The Grand Avenue Rail Project, now in its fourth year as an organization, has expanded its original proposal and continued to seek political support for the installation of a downtown streetcar system.
GARP members have focused on expanding the proposed route for the streetcar line over the past two years because of recent developments downtown like the creation of the Phoenix Biomedical Campus, said Bob Graham, GARP founder and owner of Motley Design Group.
The initial proposal spanned from McDowell Road to Jefferson Street along Grand Avenue. The proposal has now added extensions east to Fifth Street and circles along Monroe Street, up First Street to Margaret T. Hance Park. It still aims to connect the future light rail station at Seventh Avenue and Washington Street to the State Fairgrounds.
The cost of rail implementation would be around $20 million per mile, which is about half the per-mile cost of the light rail, Graham said. He said streetcars are cheaper because they run in traffic and do not require changing the width of the street.
Graham said city endorsement is the biggest roadblock for GARP. The group is currently working to get an economic benefit study funded and to garner more support from city council, though no one has come out against it, he said.
“Unless there’s a city councilperson at your back, the various departments within the city don’t really go out of their way to help you out,” he said.
If their reports can show that the program would carry a lot of people, GARP will receive federal funding, he said.
GARP consists of volunteer representatives from the Grand Avenue Members’ Association (GAMA), the Phoenix Trolley Museum, architects, community activists and downtown residents. It started in 2011 as an Arizona nonprofit corporation, and members meet three or four times a year, Graham said.
GAMA received a grant from the EPA in 2012 to make the community more sustainable, and the plan left the center lane open to allow the potential for streetcars, Graham said.
Part of GARP’s plan is to move the Trolley Museum to Grand Avenue. GARP advisor Ken Cook bought a property on Grand Avenue after a foreclosure sale and is currently leasing it out for storage.
“That’s sort of earmarked as a potential location for the trolley museum,” Graham said.
The Hance Park master plan ignored the current site of the museum, located near Culver Street and Central Avenue, depicting it instead as a skate park, Graham said.
“The Trolley Museum is not particularly loved by the city at its current location,” he said. “They need a place to run their streetcar in order to make the museum function like it ought to because they don’t have a lot of artifacts and displays and things like that — what they have is a streetcar.”
Graham said streetcar systems have become more common in the past 20 years, beginning with the implementation of the track in Portland, Oregon.
“There are very few cities the size of Phoenix that don’t have some kind of streetcar program going,” he said.
Graham said the streetcars would help connect all of downtown’s attractions and help with parking issues. He said the ASU Downtown Phoenix campus has helped change the character of downtown, and that the recently announced increases in parking-meter rates are a signal that there is more demand for people to get downtown.
“They wouldn’t be able to raise the rates if people didn’t want the parking,” he said.
Lower Grand Avenue has a “quirky yet uneven urban commercial feel,” according to GARP’s website.
Will Bruder, a member of the GARP board of directors and fellow of the American Institute of Architects, said smaller-scale connector links in public transportation, such as streetcars, will help boost the local economy.
“Modern streetcars … provide a platform for the confidence of developers to build the kind of mixed-use housing and community retail that cities need to thrive and be walkable,” he said.
Bruder said the city has found the soul of its downtown in the last decade, and that this project will help all of downtown, not just Grand Avenue.
“Developers do not invest and build communities around bus lines; they build them around tracks in the ground because of their permanence,” he said.
Karl Obergh, vice president of Roosevelt Action Association and president of Ritoch-Powell & Associates, said smaller systems like streetcar programs are important because people only feel comfortable walking about a quarter of a mile to get to public transportation.
He said the next step is to finalize the track route, gain the city’s support and continue to seek outside funding.
“The economic development this could provide is — I can’t even explain how huge that would be for the city of Phoenix and downtown,” Obergh said.
Contact the reporter at sajarvis@asu.edu
