This beauty of a map was included in volume 4 of the City of Detroit’s Master Plan in 1946.

At the time the Wayne County Road Commission defined expressways as:

“a thoroughfare with no traffic lights, no intersections at grade, with opposing traffic streams separated, and with entry and exit limited to a few chosen points.”

Not all of these became expressways thankfully, but the city does have a density of expressways primarily intersecting around Midtown.