On Super Bowl Sunday, the Detroit People Mover was a public transportation adventure.
Patrons were greeted at stations by bomb-sniffing dogs.
Riders were liable to break out into choruses of "Let's go Steelers" without warning. The trains were packed to capacity.
For Shannon Davis, a Waterford resident who occasionally rides the People Mover the few times a year she's in Detroit, it was a shock to be piled in one of the narrow cars with a few hundred other people.
"There's never anyone on here," Davis said. "Half the time it doesn't even operate."
That reputation has plagued the People Mover — an elevated electric railway that loops riders through downtown Detroit in driverless, two-car trains — since it opened in 1987.
That wasn't the case on Super Bowl Sunday. The Detroit area was hit with snow overnight and temperatures hovered around freezing, but Sunday afternoon the People Mover hadn't stopped.
Stop eight, Renaissance Center, was one of the busiest. By 11 a.m. hundreds of fans had gathered to watch Emmitt Smith and a crew of ESPN commentators broadcast NFL Live.
The Renaissance Center crowds that packed the People Mover were enthusiastic about their teams, about the game and about Detroit.
"The hospitality has just been fabulous," said John Dempsey, a Florida native. "I really hope this brings redevelopment back to the city."
The trains ran slow at times — the advertised 15-minute circuit took nearly half an hour Sunday afternoon — but they ran.
"They were waiting for the shoe to drop," said Ericka Alexander, a spokeswoman for the Detroit Transportation Corporation, which operates the People Mover. "I think we've finally broke that jinx."
Vermont resident Jerry Cifor used to work in Detroit, before security cameras were installed at People Mover stations.
"We used to call it the mugger mover," Cifor said, who was back in town with his family for the big game.
Ridership declined as closures and construction limited service from 1998 to 1999 and again from September 2002 to November 2004.
The most common complaint about the People Mover, and the hardest to overcome, is it doesn't save time. At the end of the day, it's still a short 2.9 miles of track with 13 stops, most of which are in walking distance of each other.
Stop one is Times Square, a good hike from Ford Field. But several of the Steelers' fans tailgating in the lots along Cass Avenue said they had no plans to ride the trains. Pittsburgh resident Jesse Andrews said he was just going to "start hoofing it."
On Saturday alone, 70,000 people rode, a heavy load for a system that only had 1.7 million riders in all of 2005.
Cifor said his family never rode the trains when they lived in Detroit, but were pleasantly surprised with the service during the Super Bowl weekend.
Detroit has put more than $7 million into the People Mover in recent years, updating the technology and beefing up security. Police and security guards were in place at the 13 stations, searching patrons as they boarded.
For the most part, riders were understanding of Sunday's searches, long waits and cramped trains, police said.
Stop three, Fort/Cass, connects riders to the shuttle buses that carry them out of the city and into the outlying suburbs. And it's after the fans leave, some said, that Detroit's real test begins.
"When we leave here, we're the voice to spread this around the country," said Dempsey, who has a talk-radio show in Florida. "I'm going to talk about the people, not about the game. I'm going to talk about the people."
