Everything’s got to start sometime. At least we’re starting this now, instead of in 20 years when gas costs $20/gal and people are going “Holy crap, we need light rail!”
Yes, we are. 
I’m cautiously optimistic about Light Rail. I just keep hearing stories about how it’s going to go at like 10mph and that won’t work for me. If it goes at traffic speed (35mph or +), then I probably will take it to & from work on any day that I don’t have to run an errand at lunch (which is most of them).
It’ll be very easy for me as I live right around the corner from a park & ride station and work right on the line.
The average journey speed for urban transport can often sound surprisingly slow. It’s easy to think of the equivalent journey by car being done at cruising speed, but this ignores time spent at junctions, in traffic and so on. To put it in context, I checked a randomly-chosen journey across a central part of London on a single line of the Underground (Bond Street to Liverpool Street): 17mph. Travelling the length of Manhattan on the A train is about the same.
Seems rather straightforward to me to enforce a rigid time schedule with the first stop of the bus starting at the light rail link: you just keep a stack of buses there and move them out every ten minutes, or whatever. All the airports I’ve been to that have bus or tram service between terminals have kept pretty much religiously to their schedules. I don’t see any reason to think the Phoenix airport would not be able to do the same. I mean, LaGuardia has buses that go between terminals (last time I was there I found myself at the complete wrong end of the airport when I should have been at the Marine terminal, and, shocker of shockers, a bus showed up, on time, and took me to the terminal without any problems.) Airports are about the only place I expect buses and trams to show up exactly on schedule.
I live way up at Union Hills, is it ever going to come this far north?
This isn’t London or Manhattan, though. It’s Phoenix. I drive 17 miles across town to work every day and it takes me 22 minutes. That’s 46.36 mph.
Sky Harbor’s bus system is decent, too. I’ve never had to wait more than 5-10 minutes in the long-term economy parking lot (way out on the edge of the airport) for a bus to roll on by.
Highway? Sure the light rail won’t be comparable to the highway. But I cut through the middle of Tempe, and neither the 60 nor the 202 are worth going out of my way (plus my bike isn’t quite highway-capable yet). I’ve got a 10 mile drive that takes me about 30 minutes, and 20 mph is a lot more reasonable to expect of a rail system. Plus if it’s early morning and I don’t have to worry about managing traffic? Heck yeah.
ETA: Also, the city sprawls because it could. As fuel becomes more expensive and people need to find alternate modes of transportation, businesses and residences will begin to tighten up and concentrate on the line. Folks may have a 15-20 mile drive on average now, but as time passes I imagine that average will shrink and be centered around the light rail more.
Depending on where you live in the area the highway can be slower. I take surface streets to & from work now every day and it takes from 15-30 mins depending on time of day, traffic, and how many red lights I hit. I would love to take light rail to work and back, but I won’t do it if it’s going to take me an hour to get there because it’s crawling along at 20mph and traffic is whizzing by at 40mph. I’m just not that green.
Most new rail systems start out being pretty near useless. The first subway route in L.A. ran only four miles from Union Station to McArthur Park. To be effective, a mass transit system needs to have a critical mass of disparate stations and neighborhoods that can be reached, and the early Red Line didn’t have that. True, it did connect up with the slightly older Blue Line (light rail) that ran from downtown to Long Beach. The Blue Line was a success from its start and is said to be the most heavily traveled light rail line in the country. Still, once you reached the Red Line, being able to go two miles east or west wasn’t much help.
As the Red Line was extended up Vermont and through Hollywood, and then to North Hollywood, its usefulness increased greatly, enhanced by the increasing number of people who were commuting into work on Metrolink; they could come into Union Station and then easily reach workplaces near the rail lines. These suburbanites, not surprisingly, tend to be Anglos, leading the rail system’s opponents to brand it a system for a few white people while people of color were crammed into buses. But people of color are without question the bulk of the ridership, just as on the buses–on the Blue Line overwhelmingly African-American, on the Red Line mostly Latino with some Korean-Americans, and the Green Line, which runs (almost) to the airport, a mixture. One is more likely to see airport workers than airline travelers on the Green Line.
The system has become modestly successful.
I was astonished to read in a New Yorker article that a subway ride from parts of Brooklyn to midtown Manhattan can take 90 minutes. The article mentioned that for people on these long commutes, reading matter becomes a consumable item like fuel for a fire.
The worst aspect is changing from one train to another, either because the schedules don’t mesh, or because the station is poorly designed. In L.A., the Red Line subway terminates at Union Station and the Gold Line runs from there to Pasadena. But to transfer from the subway to the Gold Line, the passenger has to walk or ride up two whole levels, because the Gold Line starts on the main intercity rail concourse. I’m definitely an advocate of mass transit, but I can see why people often think the authorities go out of their way to make it inconenient.
You’re missing the whole point about average speeds, despite commenting on the variable of how many red lights you hit. It’s not going to be ‘crawling along at 20mph’, not if it’s going to keep to their stated end-to-end time of 57 minutes.
A thought: did the route to work affect where you chose to live? Even if not, I’m sure you’ll concede that it’s a major consideration for others, which means that once the system is in place, it can become part of such decisions in the future.
The Hiawatha line was fairly well thought out and connects quite a few strategic points. It starts at the Mall of America (massive tourist destination) and runs to the Minneapolis/St.Paul airport where it runs between two main terminals that were previously unattached. From there it runs up Hiawatha Ave. that is slowly being developed with upscale condos, runs past the Mertrodome (Twins/Vikings), and into downtown Minneapolis which is interconnected with miles of skyways. I believe it will be extended a bit further to the new Twins ballpark in 2010.
Not very useful to me but excellent for a LOT of other people.
I might ride it once or twice just to see what all the fuss was about. That’s of course after it’s ridden 100 times or so already so I know it doesn’t crash and burn.
Math really isn’t my strong suit, but my point is if it takes me 15-30 mins to get to and from work on the surface streets (almost the same route as the new light rail) and it will take light rail 45-60 mins to go the same distance the average speed has to be slower, right? I know all the literature says end to end of 57mins (and I won’t be taken it all the way to the other end), but I also hear people constantly saying it will take longer than that.
I want to take light rail to and from work. I want it to be as fast (or near enough) as driving. I’m even going to take a Saturday class next semester instead of a M-F one just so I can take light rail, but if it’s going to more than double my current commute, I’m not will. That’s all I was saying.
And for me, the route to work did factor where I bought my house. Even before gas prices went insane I was careful to make sure my commute would never be more than 30mins at worst.
You’re sure it’s an equivalent route? 15 minutes to run the 20 miles of the light rail would be an average speed of 80mph. Google Maps gives me a driving route two miles longer to get between the same points.
I thought I was being whooshed or something. How do you even pronounce that?
On the other hand, Sky Harbor is a pretty cool name for an airport.
Pretty sure: It starts at Spectrum Mall at 19th ave & Bethany Home and goes south on 19th to Camelback, then east to Central, then south to Jefferson and then east again.
I live and work along the construction zone and the only thing it does differently is at Central & Camelback. It goes a bit on the diagonal around 1st ave to cut through to Central instead of making that turn.
My route to work is what I would consider equivalent. I usually go south first, then east. But my starting and ending points would be roughly the same (I’m actually a little farther than light rail would start as I don’t live on 19th ave).
I’m not saying that end to end should take 15 mins, but the stretch that I would take it (which is a shortened route) takes me 15-30 mins by car on a near identical route.
Fuh-NEE-shuns. Like The Phoenicians.
Coming from a city with a lot of Vietnamese fusion places with the word Pho (soup) prominently in their windows, I keep tripping over that extra O in Phoenicians.
How similar to this route is yours?