DTW is just about the most excessive airport that I’ve ever been to.

Everything about the damn place just screams, “a waste of money!” From a trippy, psychedelic tunnel to trams that carry people from terminal to terminal right above people walking inside the airport, there’s excess everywhere. How can so much money be spent on all the useless features in one airport but not on social services? It’s about time that we reorganized our priorities when it comes to spending.

When my flight docked in DTW, the moment I stepped off the plane, I thought immediately, “oh, this is nice!” It was clean, neat, and comfortable. I then walked towards the arrivals/departures screens to see where I should go for my next flight. Or, to be more precise, I walked towards the arrivals/departures wall. The entire wall was covered with TV screens that each scrolled through multiple arriving and departing flights, probably numbering in the hundreds total.

While it’s one thing to have a large airport that’s a hub for many different airlines, it’s a whole different matter to stuff it with various useless, aesthetic features. A picture is worth a thousand words, and in this instance that could not be more true.

This tunnel is roughly half a mile long and every single square foot of the walls and ceiling is covered with this “art glass.” It’s nice and all, but what exactly is the purpose of this entire tunnel? Perhaps the concourses actually do need to be separated by some distance (I really doubt it needs to be this much though), but how many millions of dollars were wasted on the extra flair? Those dollars could have gone towards social services, to help hundreds of impoverished people living in this country, but that money was all wasted on this tunnel in a single airport.

But if only that tunnel was the sole extravagant feature about this airport.

There is one maddening thing wrong with this scene: the tram. What’s absolutely insane about this is not only that an airport would construct a tiny tram inside the terminal, but also that they would waste the time and money to design it so that it passed on top, and in plain sight, of people walking below. What should be bothersome is that the tram is absolutely tiny, it looks cool, and it’s obviously meant to turn heads when it passes. What it shows is that the designers were not concerned about the actual usage of the tram but rather the aesthetic and “whoa” element that it would bring to the terminal. It’s rather useless too; the vast majority of people would probably be content to walk on the conveyor belts below. How many starving children could have been fed with the money that went into this project? How much assistance could have been given out to people living in poverty just from the cost that it took to build this?

I think DTW is a perfect showcase of skewed priorities when it comes to spending money. Money that could have been used for social services and the like was wasted on the fluff in this airport. How can it possibly be acceptable that social services in this country are so woefully inadequate while there is enough money for facilities like this? It’s especially angering considering that this airport is in Detroit, the one city that has probably suffered the most from the recent economic downturn.

Are facilities like DTW even needed? Are all those pretty aesthetic features really necessary for the airport, and could the money have been spent in more productive ways? You tell me. ↓