By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — Central Avenue in midtown here used to be prettier. Graceful, towering palm trees in the median divider of the major six-lane north-south surface street were a treat to see amid high-rise office buildings.
A livable city could be attractive, with workers and families going about their daily lives. Then came urban planners who preferred starting to squeeze people into higher-density housing and fixed-rail transit, the opposite of the western metropolitan suburban tone here.
The median-divider palms were yanked out as an infant light-rail system was built, and generally smooth-running Central Avenue was narrowed by one lane in each direction so the rail cars could glide along between the rubber-tired street traffic.
The Metro rail cars, which began operating in late 2008, are mostly silver unless covered by some enormous advertising messages that can look more like ugly graffiti.
Farther south on Central, the main city library used to be an architectural delight — a modernistic, horizontal structure with a pinkish-orange and white exterior that possibly suggested colors of a desert sunrise.
That library building opened in the 1950s and was expanded as Phoenix’s population exploded. In 1995 it was replaced by a hulking new central library, a short walk to the south, whose ugly exterior has been compared to an automobile battery.
Light rail runs alongside.
It’s not only culture and morals that seem degraded as the 20th century disappears in the rearview mirror.
The light rail mainly was a money-losing vanity touch in urban planners’ vain visions. Today less than one percent of passenger travel is by the rail system in Phoenix itself, more than 500 square miles, and the larger metropolitan area, which sprawls far beyond. The system is basically one line from near-northwest Phoenix to suburban Mesa in the southeast.
Which only whetted the planners’ appetites to add more still-limited trackage in a ballot proposition facing voters on August 25, Proposition 104, estimated to spend $30 billion, with a “b,” over the next 35 years.
The plan includes narrowing streets and promoting bike paths, classic ingredients of indigestible planning where commuters and covering distance are the last priorities.
This isn’t a geographically compact area that lends itself to fixed-rail mass transit, but what current urban planner has much patience with freeways and proven, flexible city buses?
Randal O’Toole, a transit expert with the libertarian Cato Institute national think tank, spoke to a Tea Party meeting here July 29 about planners’ war against the working class that gives rise to “boutique cities” too expensive for ordinary people to inhabit.
“They want to make American urban areas like European ones,” O’Toole told the audience, adding that Agenda 21 “is just a reflection of what urban planners have been thinking for generations.”
Agenda 21 is a globalist scheme from the United Nations for heavy-handed “sustainable development” to restructure people’s lives to suit the planners.
O’Toole opposes the proposed light-rail expansion here. He authored a study, Review of Phoenix Comprehensive Transportation Plan, accessible at azfree.org, the site of the Arizona Free Enterprise Club.
No Social Benefit
Sitting down to chat before his talk, O’Toole said the “thinking” class is “trying to design cities for themselves, not the working class,” and turning areas like San Francisco and Boston “into boutique cities.”
The working class probably has to live in a location like Modesto, Calif., he said, and commute 85 miles to San Francisco, while the planners want to “attract the creative class,” with its preference for a Starbucks coffee shop or a boutique store instead of a small-business hair salon. Light rail is part of this, he said.
Planners like to ask skewed questions, he said, like: Would you rather live in a neighborhood where you can walk to everything?
That sounds very convenient, O’Toole said, but omitted from the question is the fact that such a neighborhood residence is a $400,000 urban condo instead of a more-affordable $200,000, four-bedroom suburban home, “with privacy and a yard. That really changes your concept” about how to answer the question.
Nobody in “a suburb or rural area thinks they should be able to dictate the lifestyle of anyone else,” O’Toole said, but the city dwellers do, believing they get this power of command from some theory they have, like opposing “global warming.”
Tracing historical development in the United States, O’Toole said, “Nobody complained about urban sprawl” when the upper class began to move away from the cities in the 1830s, or the middle class in the 1890s, but only when the working class did in the 20th century.
Listing some of the flexibilities of bus transit, O’Toole noted that a stalled light-rail train shuts down the entire line, while a stalled bus is simply passed on the street by other buses. Buses also can be articulated, with two bus bodies linked by a pivoting joint, or double-decker, increasing their capacity, he said.
O’Toole, an Oregon resident, said that in Portland, only 20 light-rail trains per hour are allowed on a line due to safety considerations, but 160 buses per hour can travel.
Even light rail’s name is “a lie,” he said. “Turns out a light-rail car weighs one-third more as a heavy-rail car. . . . They aren’t referring to weight, they’re referring to capacity.”
The initial operating cost for a Phoenix bus is $1 million per mile, but for light rail, it’s $150 million a mile, in addition to which light rail needs feeder buses, O’Toole said.
In 1981, the first light-rail line in the United States was built in San Diego at a cost of $10 million a mile, with no federal funding, he said.
His study about the Phoenix transit plan said it “offers no social benefit to counter its high cost, as it would increase traffic congestion, energy usage, and greenhouse-gas emissions. Phoenix’s transit system as a whole uses more energy and emits more greenhouse gases per passenger mile than the average SUV.
“The City of Phoenix’s fantasy of ‘reinventing Phoenix’ by building denser housing along the rail line seems unlikely to be realized,” his study continued.
“It won’t significantly reduce driving, and even if it did, it makes little sense to get people out of their cars and onto transit that is more expensive, produces less economic value, uses more energy, and emits more pollution than driving. . . .
“When combined with transit fares and federal grants, the city’s transportation plan is expected to spend more than $30 billion through 2050,” O’Toole wrote.
He told The Wanderer that he recently wrote at his Cato think-tank blog that the San Francisco Bay area is the most racist in the country due to restrictive land-use planning, making it one of the least-affordable housing markets in the nation.
“Though that region’s population grew by 285,000 people between 2000 and 2010, or 9.5 percent, the region’s black population actually shrank by nearly 49,000, or 14.2 percent, for a difference in growth rates of minus 23.7 percent,” he blogged on July 9.
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