Photos by Madeline Pado
Four of five panelists identified the Valley Metro light rail as downtown’s biggest transportation success at this semester’s first Downtown Devil Discussion on Tuesday, but they agreed there was still room for improvement.
Journalism senior Nick Gnat, who uses public transportation to commute to his jobs and news assignments, agreed the light rail is a success but said its limited reach often complicates timely arrivals.
“When you need to get somewhere by a certain time, that’s something you depend on public transportation for in, say, New York or other big cities like London or even D.C.,” Gnat said during the discussion. “People who have cars right now, they know that they can take their car from place to place, and yes, they may run into congestion or something of that nature, but they can get anywhere in a reasonable amount of time. And right now, I can’t say that about public transportation in Arizona. There are a very small group of places I can get to.”
Access to locations beyond the light rail is limited because it is essentially a straight shot from Phoenix’s 19th and Montebello avenues to Mesa’s Sycamore and Main streets, said Mike Kuby, a professor at ASU’s School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning.
“We all know one light-rail line isn’t going to make a system for people to get places,” said Kuby, who is the director of ASU’s interdisciplinary graduate-certificate program in transportation. “You need a network, and it’s going to take decades to build a light-rail network. We just don’t have the funding.”
Though two rail-extension projects are in progress, significant access to other parts of Phoenix via light rail may be a long time coming.
“We are a young transit town,” said Hillary Foose, director of communication and marketing for Valley Metro. “We’re not New York. We’ll never be New York unless we drastically change our land use and our density. We’re young, and we have a lot more growth to do.”
Such development is a long process due to a deficiency in funding, she said.
“Growth, no matter how smart and how publicly vetted, always has a funding limitation,” Foose said. “We just need more money to do it at a quicker pace. We’re still doing it; it’s just very incremental.”
Community activist and SideWalk Phoenix founder Nicole Underwood said reluctance to use public transportation on a regular basis is often an issue of convenience and personal preference.
“Convenience is the crutch,” she said during the discussion. “So if you’re using convenience as your reasoning for having a car, that’s part of the issue of why we have so much car density.”
Underwood said she stopped driving her car about a year ago, when gasoline no longer fit into her budget. She now commutes to work through a combination of walking, biking and public transportation.
“It really is just a comfort level. The fear of the unknown is what hinders people from making a change in their routine,” Underwood said during the discussion. “So if you take little steps — start walking versus driving from point A to point B, do that a few times a week, incorporate public transportation and carpooling into your routine — then it just starts becoming the norm and then you’re able to wean off of other things.”
Phoenix bicycle coordinator and Phoenix Street Transportation Department traffic engineer Joseph Perez said the choice to use public transportation is a time-saving one for commuters.
“Public transportation gives them time back,” Perez said. “It gives them the opportunity to complete tasks they can’t complete while driving. You can do all those things on a train or a bus that you can’t do stuck in traffic.”
But for those with destinations beyond the light rail corridor, public transportation is still sometimes lacking.
“There aren’t enough hours in the day for me to get from place to place,” Gnat said during the discussion. “It’s not always a matter of willpower.”
Contact the report at chloe.brooks@asu.edu
