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Dan Gilbert’s Bedrock LLC is looking to better connect the Detroit People Mover with future Hudson’s Detroit visitors.
On Wednesday, the Downtown Development Authority approved a matching $50,000 grant to fund a design study to assess the most effective way for people to navigate between Hudson’s Detroit and the nearby Cadillac Center People Mover station.
“When Hudson’s comes online at its full capacity, there’s gonna be thousands of thousands of people coming … There’s some parking around it, but not enough to accommodate all of those guests,” Kevin Mull, senior director for the Office of Urban Strategy and Innovation for Bedrock, told Crain’s.
The Multi-Modal Mobility Hub design study will consider the impact on flow of vehicle and pedestrian traffic in the area around the Hudson’s site and the People Mover station, as well as the impact of dynamic curbside technology and more.
“What excites us about this is taking the time to study what can be done to make the People Mover maximally useful to the success of Hudson’s Detroit, because it’s going to be a very active node downtown,” said Luke Polcyn, senior executive for development and economic transformation for the city and Detroit Transportation Corp. board vice chairperson.
It allows for an opportunity to leverage the existing Cadillac Center station to best meet the demand generated by Hudson’s Detroit, Polcyn said. The $1.4 billion Hudson’s Detroit project includes ground-level retail and event space, commercial office space, and a luxury Edition Hotel, plus Edition Hotel-branded condominiums within the tower.
The idea for the study originated in the Urban Tech Xchange, a technology collaborative on the third floor of Bedrock’s Lane Bryant building at 1520 Woodward Ave., and the Detroit Transportation Corp. UTX will fund the other half of the total $100,000 study. Partners in the project also include the city of Detroit.
The crux of the study is determining how to maximize and optimize the transport of people downtown. It will be led by UNStudio, an architecture, urban development and infrastructure firm headquartered in Amsterdam. Bedrock was attracted to the firm because of the work it’s doing in Austin, Texas, with public transit initiative Project Connect, Mull said.
Bedrock is focused on an area it calls an “innovation triangle,” which encompasses buildings along the east side of Woodward Ave and south of Broadway Street, as well as One Campus Martius and the Cadillac Center People Mover station to the east of the Skillman Branch of the Detroit Public Library.
The study will be done in part through Bedrock’s digital twin, which is a virtual map of Bedrock properties within Detroit, that will allow the study partners to make design changes within the digital model and see how users react to changes.
The virtual map should also expedite the timeline of the study. The concept design study is anticipated to take approximately three to four months, Mull said, with the intention of implementing any findings of the study shortly after Hudson’s Detroit goes online. Those could include smart parking signs, dynamic curbside pickup, information boards, activating the facade of the People Mover stations and more.
Mull hopes the findings of the study can be used across different areas downtown to drive further enhancements for residents and visitors.
“What I think would be a really rewarding outcome would be to see enhancements to that part of downtown that both help people more effectively navigate in and around the space, but also further activate downtown in a very modern, high-tech way, if our findings drive those types of outcomes,” Mull said.
Findings from the study could be used in combination with the Downtown Mobility Study that will consider small and large-scale improvements and enhancements of the People Mover. That 12-month study received an $800,000 grant from the Michigan Department of Transportation and will be led by Texas-based infrastructure consulting firm AECOM.
At the end of the study, the findings will determine whether UTX and Bedrock will implement changes, or whether additional public funding will be needed for the Detroit Transportation Corp. and People Mover to make enhancements.
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