The Ford Motor Company was involved in one of the designs of the People Mover and had hired AlScott Service Company to design and build a room size working model of the system. Of the seven cities with UMTA approval for their People Mover proposals, only Detroit and Miami persevered to build and operate systems. In addition, UMTA decided they would approve proposals from Baltimore, Detroit, and Miami to develop People Mover systems if they could do so with existing grant commitments. From these, they selected proposals from Cleveland, Houston, Los Angeles, and St. UMTA reviewed thirty-five full proposals. In 1975, following the failure to produce any large-scale results and increased pressure to show results, UMTA created the Downtown People Mover Program (DPM) and sponsored a nationwide competition that offered federal funds to cover much of the cost of planning and construction of such a system.

The Detroit People Mover has its origins in 1966, with the creation of the federal Urban Mass Transportation Administration (UMTA) to develop new types of transit. The system also connects to DDOT and SMART bus routes as part of a comprehensive network of transportation in metropolitan Detroit. The People Mover is supplemented by the QLine streetcar, which connects the system with Midtown, New Center, and the Detroit Amtrak station. In 2022, the system had a ridership of 364,300, or about 1,700 per weekday as of the first quarter of 2023. The system operates in a one-way loop on a single track encircling downtown Detroit, using Intermediate Capacity Transit System linear induction motor technology developed by the Urban Transportation Development Corporation. The Detroit People Mover ( DPM) is a 2.94-mile (4.73 km) elevated automated people mover system in Detroit, Michigan, United States.

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