The Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT) has decided it wants to flip the Detroit Greyhound station on Howard and the Lodge to a developer, possibly for a parking garage, according to this article in the Detroit Free Press.

The state is proposing to evict Greyhound as early as this October, and push all Greyhound operations in Detroit to the tiny Detroit Amtrak station at Woodward and Baltimore in New Center.

No matter that the Amtrak "station" (actually a prefabricated structure usually known as an Amshack) has a waiting area about one-fifth the size of the existing Greyhound station, a space completely unequipped to accommodate the 1000 riders currently pass through the existing Greyhound station each day.

No matter that there's no room for bus bays, which would require the 50 buses a day that come through the station to park on the street, and make riders trudge to their buses in the rain and snow.

No matter that there are only two public restroom stalls in the Amtrak station, which is totally inadequate for combined bus and train rider traffic.

Over the long term, a new bus-train station in New Center could accommodate Greyhound. But there's currently no timeline for making that happen. MDOT's plan is to build that new intermodal station in "a few years."

It's hard not to see a big dose of racism and classism at work in MDOT's apparent indifference to the needs of bus riders.

But MDOT's mission is to serve the traveling public of Michigan, not to line its pockets with developer cash. The safety and comfort of riders count for more than the profit motives of developers.

We urge MDOT director Paul Ajegba and his immediate supervisors, Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Lt. Governor Garlin Gilchrist II, to reconsider this absurd course of action. We demand that the state allow the Greyhound station to remain at its current site until such time as a new intermodal station, capable of handling combined bus and train traffic, is constructed in Detroit’s New Center.