Transit Wins Over Even the Goldwater Institute
Twenty-five years ago, the citizens of Dallas were presented with an audacious public spending plan. Bear in mind, that Dallas isn’t Los Angeles or Boston. Dallas is deeply conservative and absolutely anti-tax. The audacious spending plan was the creation of one of Texas’s largest public agencies, the Dallas Area Rapid Transit Agency (“DART”). Full disclosure, I sit on the Board of Directors of the agency. Anyway, somehow, even in the North Texas anti-tax world, the citizens voted to tax themselves, through a one penny sales tax increase, to build out a transit system that would rival any system in the world. Twenty-five years later, DART has been recognized several times as the best transit system in America.
It has taken 25 years of vision and hard work to accomplish what DART has done. A remarkable feat, in spite of the length of time it took to get the system built. Interestingly, the citizens of Phoenix were faced with a similar issue years ago. Phoenix proposed to build a $1 billion dollar light rail system that would connect central Phoenix to Mesa and Tempe. The Goldwater Institute, came out against the project because it would increase taxes and “be a riderless failure”. The riderless failure has turned into one of the few things Phoenix can crow about in this down economy. Certainly, no one is singing the real estate song in Phoenix these days. The Phoenix light rail system has exceeded every forecast in terms of the number of riders and has increased the connectivity of a sprawling metropolis. Hmm, sounds a lot like DART, only 1/5 the size. Look for more interest in mass transit as America matures. It works, it is green, and it allows people to live and work for less cost.
See snippets of today’s NY Times article “In Phoenix, Weekend Users Make Light Rail a Success” below.
The light rail here, which opened in December, has been a greater success than its proponents thought it would be, but not quite the way they envisioned. Unlike the rest of the country’s public transportation systems, which are used principally by commuters, the 20 miles of light rail here stretching from central Phoenix to Mesa and Tempe is used largely by people going to restaurants, bars, ball games and cultural events downtown.
The rail was projected to attract 26,000 riders per day, but the number is closer to 33,000, boosted in large part by weekend riders. Only 27 percent use the train for work, according to its operator, compared with 60 percent of other public transit users on average nationwide.
The gaggle of light rail users — including Arizona State University students, who use a line that connects its Tempe campus with the downtown campus — have given a small part of the city a new, dense connectivity that was more or less unheard of in the city two years ago. Pub crawls along the light rail have become a weekend staple, and restaurants have seen new customers from outside the neighborhood popping in off the line for brunch on the weekends.
“I think the biggest impact of the light rail is less tangible,” said Matt Poolin, owner of Matt’s Big Breakfast, a busy spot along the line, “which is that it really improves the image and perception of Phoenix’s downtown, which, although experiencing a significant renaissance in recent years, still is undergoing many improvements and changes. The light rail, largely because it is so well run and nicely appointed, is something that I think most people are really proud of and feel positive about. It is rare to hear anyone complain, despite all of the controversy.”
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