The plot against light rail
Posted inDowntown & central Phoenix Phoenix Politics: Arizona/Phoenix

The plot against light rail

LRT downtownThis is the reality of Phoenix's light-rail system: nearly 16 million passengers carried in the most recent fiscal year; expansion of the original 20-mile starter line to 26 miles; an essential link between ASU's Tempe and downtown campuses; 30 percent of riders use the train for work; large numbers use it to reach sporting events; $11 billion in private and public investment has occurred along the line since 2008.

Light rail has also proved essential in giving Phoenix, Tempe, and Mesa a fighting chance in an era where talented young people and high-quality companies want to be in city cores served by rail transit.

None — not one — of the hysterical predictions of opponents to light rail came true.

No wonder that voters backed light rail in three elections, in 2000, 2004, and 2015. We built it.

But destructive forces never sleep, never stop. Backed by dark money — including the Koch brothers and their nationwide war on transit — here comes Proposition 105 in the Aug. 27th special election. As is often the case, it's presented as an affirmative to deliberately confuse voters. "Vote yes!" hoping some will think they are supporting rail transit by marking that line. Signs say, "Yes on 105. Fix our roads" — but this has nothing to do with fixing roads; that's a different budget and roads are being fixed.

Don't fall for it. Vote no on Prop. 105 and its devilish companion, Prop. 106.

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Ten questions about light rail, answered
Posted inDowntown & central Phoenix Phoenix Phoenix 101: History

Ten questions about light rail, answered

PhxLRT2
It's the tenth anniversary of the completion of metro Phoenix light rail (WBIYB). I'll have a history of the project in a special insert of the Arizona Capitol Times. In the meantime, some common questions and answers.

1. What decided the route of the starter line? It was a combination of demand, available right-of-way, and cost. The line follows the route of the old Red Line bus, which was at 125 percent of capacity by 2000. This ensured high ridership and a favorable outcome in federal funding (with an invaluable assist from the late Rep. Ed Pastor).

2. Why was it built at grade rather than as a subway or monorail? Cost. While both those modes — especially a subway — would have been preferable to street running, the funding was not available. The federal government once spent heavily for such subways as the D.C. Metro and Atlanta's MARTA (originally meant for Seattle), but that aid largely ended by the 1980s. Monorails also have the problem of controversy about being unsightly to some, although the Skytrain in Vancouver, B.C., part overhead and part subway, is highly successful.

3. Did Mesa almost miss out on light rail? Yes. The most conservative big city in America was especially wary of the project, and the starter line might have ended at McClintock Drive in Tempe. If so, it would have been very expensive to eventually build into Mesa. Mayor Keno Hawker played a leading role in securing city council approval of the line to Sycamore. This set the table for extending light rail deep into downtown Mesa under Mayor Scott Smith (now Valley Metro CEO). With Phoenix, Tempe, and Mesa on board, this helped the metro area rise in the national competition for federal assistance.

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Posted inPolitics: National

National suicide…really?

[UPDATE] The answer is yes. Join the open thread on the comments to discuss the election results.

Are you really going to do it, America? Give control of the Senate to The Party That Wrecked America?

If the polls are to be believed, the answer is "yes." It is true that polling undercounts Democratic votes. But the indications are not good. Consider that in Colorado, incumbent Gov. John Hickenlooper is trailing a full bore Krackpot who claims the IUD is an abortion device.

Andrew Sullivan wrote an interesting post on the midterms. Among his comments:

Republican candidates have made this election about (President Obama), while most Democrats (as is their wont) are running fast away; the GOP itself remains, however, also deeply unpopular; wrong-direction numbers are at a high. No great policy debate has defined these races, and when such issues have risen – such as illegal immigration or the ACA – they tend to be virulent reactions to existing law or proposed changes, rather than a constructive, positive agenda. I see no triumph for conservative or liberal ideas here, no positive coalition forming, no set of policies that will be vindicated by this election.

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Posted inPolitics: National

And that’s the way it is

I wondered if Barack Obama became a one-term president with his astonishingly vapid Oval Office speech on the Gulf oil disaster. But maybe Mr. Obama has the pulse of the nation better than any of us who wanted real change and the fierce urgency of now. It was grotesquely ironic that a few days after offering the usual presidential platitudes about the need to wean ourselves off oil, he was in Columbus, Ohio, touting his stimulus by dedicating work on a road expansion. It was, he said, the 10,000th road project that the stim has funded.

Around the nation the transit systems that had been dramatically expanding ridership as gasoline prices rose are now starving from state and local fiscal crises. Amtrak, despite the vice-president's supposed love of it, remains a shadow of the passenger rail system it succeeded and a political pawn awaiting further cutbacks and the demand that it "pay for itself." This even though no major transportation network pays for itself, certainly not roads. And this despite evidence that road projects don't even have much of a positive effect on unemployment. High-speed rail? It's being studied, even though other advanced and ambitious nations already have systems and are expanding them. Cincinnati, a lovely central city that has been devastated by freeways and sprawl, can't even
muster the civic sanity to fund a streetcar line. America will continue its dependency on roads and cars — something far beyond our competitors in Europe or China. Why? Because that's the way it it.

We care about the poor birds and fish being killed by the oil spill. But not enough to give up our cars. We live magical thinking: That technology will simply replace the inexpensive light sweet crude that powered the automotive age. Rather like the technology that was supposed to allow BP to drill miles down into the earth to extract the remaining crude in the Gulf of Mexico. Electric cars will be expensive and require minerals from places other than America — many of them unstable — as well as demanding electricity from power plants that will be run on…what? Fossil fuels most likely. Beyond that, the dreams become loopy. Space aliens are not going to drop by and give us magical hydrogen cars. Tar sands are not going to yield inexpensive gasoline. Few seem to understand that the fossil fuel "imputs" into most alternative fuels are greater than the new energy produced; many also have nasty environmental or other unintended consequences. Nowhere is this more true than with any alternative to the big oil hog: automobiles.

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How freeways remade Phoenix
Posted inDowntown & central Phoenix Phoenix Phoenix 101: History

How freeways remade Phoenix

BlackCanyon1960s
The Black Canyon Freeway, Phoenix's first, in the 1960s.

Motoring around metro Phoenix today, it's difficult to comprehend that this was not always a huge agglomeration of real-estate ventures connected by freeways. In fact, Phoenix didn't want them, would have been better off without many of them, yet couldn't avoid their eventual triumph.

In 1950, when Phoenix came in as America's 100th most populous city, it occupied a mere 17 square miles, with a population density of more than 6,200 per square mile, around what you'd find in today's Seattle or Portland. In other words, a real small city: cohesive, walkable, sustainable and scalable. Remnants of the old city exist, but much has been annihilated, not least by the freeways.

By 1960, the city of Phoenix had 439,170 people and nearly 188 square miles. It was a big city of the automobile age, the old streetcars long gone, and federally subsidized sprawl under way. Around this time, the state Highway Department adopted an ambitious freeway plan prepared by Wilbur Smith & Associates, one of the nation's leading highway transportation planning firms. It envisioned much of the system eventually built. The engineers had wanted to build freeways in Phoenix since the late 1940s. One route would have gone directly in front of the Hotel Westward Ho.

But most Phoenicians were horrified. They weren't enamored with the small Black Canyon Freeway, Phoenix's first (it wound around at Durango Street to become the Maricopa Freeway, rammed through powerless barrios).

An urban legend persists that Eugene C. Pulliam single-handedly defeated the freeway plan in the early 1970s. Although the Arizona Republic and Phoenix Gazette were indeed powerful in those days and not afraid to crusade (sometimes for the right reasons, sometimes not), freeways were widely resisted.

Phoenicians then didn't want to become another Los Angeles in this bad way, and they had a chance to avoid the fate. LA had shown (and Robert Moses' New York before it) that freeways didn't solve traffic congestion — they generated it through the phenomenon called induced demand. We didn't want worse smog. We didn't want to lose our views to concrete and the citrus groves to further sprawl. Of particular alarm was the 100-foot-high Papago Freeway Inner Loop planned across central Phoenix, with monstrous "helicoils" discharging traffic onto Third Avenue and Third Street. 

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Posted inPhoenix

The vision thing

It's good to know that one sector in Phoenix has escaped the recession: the "visioning" industry. Meetings led by consultants and officials can still be held to get "public input" that will lead to…nothing. I remember such a farce that the "city" of Buckeye paid god-knows-how-much-for in the mid-2000s: Respondents most wanted commuter rail to Phoenix. Where are the trains?

The city of Phoenix's Planning Department has been going around to the assorted "urban villages" of this 500-square-mile collection of real-estate ventures asking citizens to "imagine Phoenix the best it can be in 2050." This is all part of updating the holy General Plan, which supposedly guides all development. As the city presentation puts it, "a General Plan is a comprehensive guide for all physical aspects of a city, but also addresses issues such as building neighborhoods and creating community." Like that General Plan of the 1970s that said Bell Road would absolutely, positively be the permanent northern boundary of Phoenix.

If I'm reading the information from the Downtown Voices Coalition correctly, the attendees at the central Phoenix meeting wanted higher density to support mixed use, downtown and transit. Alas, Ahwatukee's top vision for 2050 was "safety," although it wants light rail. The swells of Camelback East want something called "the village concept" (inbred people with pitchforks hiding a local monster?) — no mention of a downtown at all, certainly not light rail (it might bring "those people"). Far-off Desert View wants most a "small town, large city" feel. Maryvale at least ranks downtown and "proper public transit."

So much for imagining a great city.

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Posted inPhoenix

Arizona, unstimulated

The political faith of the Kookocracy is not just that government "is the problem," but that government is outright evil. Without the socialist Jan Brewer restraining them, they dream of a state with a government out of the Coolidge years (without that pesky Herbert Hoover as Commerce Secretary). I'll never forget giving a speech to some Phoenix Young Republicans. A woman in her twenties said all aid to the less fortunate should be terminated. If they protest? "Shoot them in the streets," she said, chillingly serious.

Of course, in the reality based world Arizona is a government creation, and takes more in government services than it pays in taxes. It is a welfare queen. Despite all the cries of "SOCIALISM," it has taken federal stimulus money. Nevertheless, the faith persists. Low taxes, little regulation and a continuing battle to stifle any "activism" (such as funding Science Foundation Arizona or that Don Budinger and his efforts to improve impoverished schools) will produce the best "business climate" in the country. Anybody in need, well, deserves their lot. Best-practices used around the world for economic development are SOCIALISM!!

So how's that working out for you?

Arizona gets an F grade in the new Assets and Opportunities Scorecard from the non-partisan (and backed by big business) CFed. Arizona is one of only five states to get the lowest grade in this report that tracks 92 measures of well-being. Its peers are all in the South. You don't need a report to know the depression that is ravaging Phoenix. One out of four residents is uninsured.

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Posted inUncategorized

Why newspapers matter, still

Seattle's recent snowbound mess offered an object lesson in why newspapers remain essential to communities. With analysts expecting several major newspapers to shut down in 2009, including those in one-paper cities, it's worth noting what happened in the Emerald City.

A little background: On Dec. 18, it began snowing here, even at sea-level downtown. Snow is a rarity in this city of hills — even though enough falls to stick every three years or so. This was reportedly the worst snowfall in a dozen years. We got about six inches downtown, and it was far worse in other parts of Seattle. The city has 27 snowplows. The city was paralyzed.

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Posted inPhoenix

The Gateway to fresh folly in Phoenix

Here we go again.

According to the East Valley Tribune, DMB Associates has made public the plans for its part of the old GM Proving Grounds near Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport. But wait,

Dense, urban spaces, narrow pedestrian pathways to a nearby coffee shop
or bookstore, a short drive to work. That’s the kind of urbanism
southeast Mesa can expect in the future, if things go as planned by the
developer of 3,200 acres of property.

My friend Grady Gammage, the land-use lawyer, adds: "We’re hoping to hit the sweet spot where we embrace the 21st-century dynamic nature with something significantly urban." But then comes the story’s money shot:

To embrace its moniker of "21st-century desert urbanism," DMB would
like a flexible framework to work with, one that develops as the market
dictates over the years. Under this new type of planned district, which Mesa approved last
September, a developer gets to create a zoning ordinance for a property
and is able to get some flexibility in future development.

What’s wrong with this? Almost everything.

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Posted inUncategorized

Oil prices falling — will IQs follow?

Gasoline at $5, $6, $10 a gallon over the next two years would have been a severe mercy for the United States. It would have forced changes that will eventually be essential: more transit and rail passenger service, a return to our core cities, an urgency to raise fuel economy standards and develop alternatives. At last suburban and exurban living would be properly priced and costly, and the enterprise to retrofit savable suburbia to transit could begin. Foot-dragging on reducing greenhouse gases would have been similarly eliminated.

I don’t think it will go down that way. Oil prices have been dropping in recent days, as I long predicted they would. The decline is because the nation that uses a quarter of the world’s petroleum is seen heading into a nasty recession, which will cut world demand. So prices will drop, and soon we can expect some to start saying the worst is over and we can get back to driving SUVs and other self-destructive behavior.

(I think of a story in today’s Arizona Republic about Lake Powell "recovering," and the ‘Zonies thinking "happy days are here again!" even though their water crisis is unabated — although a State Secret).

Yet the fundamentals haven’t changed. World oil production has either reached peak or will do so in a few years. That means half of this one-time resource will have been extracted and burned off — and it was the easy half, the cheap half. So the remainder will be more costly, and getting it will be more geopolitically destabilizing. So oil will fall a little, then rise more the next time; retreat a bit again and resume its upward climb. The major oil companies and oil exporting nations (which control most of the oil) know this. Most Americans still don’t.

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Posted inUncategorized

In Seattle, another chance to shoot ourselves in the foot and reload?

Seattle is the most backward city on the West Coast when it comes to mass transit. That still puts it light-years ahead of most American cities. Its bus system is quite good, the first light-rail line opens next year and a street car now links downtown to the burgeoning South Lake Union district. Sounder commuter heavy rail runs from Tacoma north to Everett. In addition, the Cascades Amtrak service provides convenient service between Eugene, Ore., and Vancouver, B.C., including Portland and Seattle. The ferry service is the best in America, despite recent underfunding.

But Seattle residents feel profoundly inferior to Portland, with its world-class light rail system, and Vancouver, with its SkyTrain. And its a sign of how much progress has been made in California that all the service I mention above is a fraction of what’s available in LA, San Francisco or San Diego. Yet Seattle is also the gang that couldn’t shoot straight when it comes to many transit projects.

A roads-and-transit measure was defeated last year. Now an all-transit measure may come to the November ballot, and already newspapers, powerful suburban developers and even the generally pro-transit King County executive Ron Sims are opposing it. Seattle’s misadventures with transit have lessons that apply to other cities, and will be more important in years ahead when a lifestyle based on long, individual auto trips becomes less viable.

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Posted inPhoenix

On transportation, stuff you can’t make up

Gov. Janet Napolitano is not so tough when it comes to dealing with the real power in Arizona. Thus, we have this story broken last week by Capitol Media Services:

Gov. Janet Napolitano agreed to take home builders off the
financial hook for paying for new roads in exchange for a $100,000
donation to a campaign to persuade voters to boost their own taxes.

The deal, outlined in a letter obtained by Capitol Media Services,
resulted in the recrafting of the $42.6 billion transit improvement
initiative shortly before it was filed Tuesday to remove a provision to
raise at least some of the money from fees on new developments — fees
that would be added to the cost of new homes.
Instead the final version of the initiative — the one being
circulated for signatures — calls for the entire costs of new highways,
widened roads and mass transit projects to be paid for with a 1-cent
increase in the state sales tax, an increase of 18 percent from the
current 5.6 cent state levy.

I suppose this could be shrewd if it delivers long-needed Phoenix-Tucson rail service and commuter rail to Pinal County, not merely more roads. But it comes at a huge price, may never be approved, and will face the usual rear-guard attacks by the Legislature.

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Posted inPolitics: National

The gas tax ‘holiday’ and magical thinking

How can we explain the latest Wall Street Journal/MSNBC poll that shows only 27 percent of respondents have a positive view of the Republican Party yet the Democratic presidential contenders are, at best, tied with President-elect McCain? Is it the inanity of the corporate media? Is it is ignorance of the American voter, who has been brainwashed to believe the right-wing tool McCain is a "maverick"? The next several months will tell.

It’s surely not a good sign that the nation sits paralyzed before multiple crises while people distract themselves with an evil pervert in Austria and some celebutard girl posing semi-nude in Vanity Fair. The corporate media would not cover this stuff if Americans didn’t tune in, in huge, denial-soaked, distraction-addicted numbers.

Obama must show he is "an average guy" — how’d that work out for us with W? We need a president who is average with Washington, Lincoln and FDR — our crises are that dire. And Jeremiah Wright — must keep that front-and-center. Did Obama do enough? Was he too late? Is he damaged? Has the cow jumped over the moon?

Nor is it a good sign that the "gas tax holiday" of President-elect McCain and Sen. Clinton (perhaps running as his vice president?) has not been laughed off stage. How many ways is this a ridiculous idea? And Yet Obama is the "elitist…out of touch with average Americans" who is the party pooper by refusing to endorse it.

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Posted inPolitics: National

Congress and big oil: junkies blaming the pusher man

Maybe it was inevitable, with the closing of the frontier and the amassing of so much wealth, with the death of history teaching in schools and the idiocy inducing drug of television. Maybe it was inevitable with all this and more that America would become a nation of whining children.

Fresh evidence comes today with the theater of oil executives being called before "outraged" members of Congress to defend their obscene profits at a time when gasoline profits are so high. As the Washington Post reports:

Lawmakers seeking a way to deal with rising concern among motorists
took aim at the oil companies and the record profits they registered
last year amid record oil prices "I believe the laws of supply and demand when it comes to oil and gas are broken and completely malfunctioning," said Rep. John B. Larson (D-Conn.).

I hate to break it to the distinguished gentleman from the Constitution State, but the laws of supply and demand are functioning perfectly well.

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Posted inPolitics: National

Lies, damned lies, and withdrawal from Iraq

It’s easy to beat up John McCain for wanting to stay the bloody course in Iraq, indeed that America might have troops there for next 100 years. McCain’s strategy won’t be merely more of the same. It will be a push way down the slippery slope. But there’s much wishful thinking and dissembling on the part of the Democrats, too.

If Iraq really were another Vietnam, withdrawal would be without serious geopolitical consequences. Yet we shouldn’t forget the moral consequences of our withdrawal, with millions of South Vietnamese facing a brutal takeover and thousands who worked for us facing far worse. Hmong tribesmen who supported the CIA’s secret war in Laos are still on the run, abandoned by the superpower that so cavalierly used them. We should have gotten out. We shouldn’t forget that the cost was high.

But Iraq is not Vietnam, a fact that should be remembered every time a Democrat drives home from an anti-war rally in his SUV.

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