How to read Metro DetroitHow many miles are you from zero?

From the zero point in Campus Martius Park, the downtown corner of Woodward and Michigan Avenue. The zero line is the straight stretch of Michigan Avenue and, farther west, Ford Road; 8 Mile runs about eight miles north of it.²¹⁵

Because it is Michigan’s 1815 survey baseline (Base Line Road), Detroit’s northern city limit and Wayne County’s border with Oakland and Macomb, and, as the Detroit Historical Society puts it, the symbol of the line between city and suburbs. The world knows it from Eminem’s 2002 film 8 Mile.⁴²⁹⁷

Because cities and counties did the naming. Macomb County uses numbers almost everywhere, Oakland County uses names north of 14 Mile, and in Detroit the roads below 5 Mile have names of their own. The switch usually happens at Dequindre Road, the Oakland–Macomb county line.²³

No. Roads below 5 Mile go only by their names: Warren (1), Joy (2), Plymouth (3), Schoolcraft (4). Plymouth Road, for one, runs to the city of Plymouth, so it never became Three Mile.²¹

To 38 Mile, on the northern edge of Oakland and Macomb counties. There are half-mile lines in between (Toepfer, Stephens, Frazho, Martin, Common…), but they go by their names; nobody writes 8½ Mile.³

Really. Big Beaver Road is 16 Mile’s name in Troy, and exit 69 on I-75 leads to it. In Macomb County the same line is Metropolitan Parkway.⁶³

One statute mile, 1,609 meters, roughly a twenty-minute walk. That puts 8 Mile about 12.9 km (8 miles) from downtown and Hall Road about 32 km (20 miles) out.²