# From Skeptic to True Believer



## willem (May 14, 2015)

An Arizona Mayor Embraces Light Rail

<http://www.routefifty.com/2015/05/arizona-mayor-light-rail/112690/>

I hope he shares his conversion with other elected officials.


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## Shawn Ryu (May 15, 2015)

OT but if there was a political will and money was there and population jutified it would subway system work in Phoenix? Or is it too hot?


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## neroden (May 15, 2015)

Shawn Ryu said:


> OT but if there was a political will and money was there and population jutified it would subway system work in Phoenix? Or is it too hot?


Phoenix is so spread out and flat that there's no reason to go underground. They were able to put light rail in the medians of the streets with gobs of room to spare.


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## Aaron (May 15, 2015)

In a perfect world of infinite money and political will, you'd go underground precisely because of the heat. It's nice and cool even 50 feet underground at the same time that it's 115 degrees outside.

That's always been my problem with the light rail in Phoenix. You can't have the same expectations about frequency and ridership since a rider's tolerance for waiting outside for a train will be much shorter for a good part of the year. That, and the traditional half mile estimate of how far people are willing to walk to or from a stop gets completely thrown out the window. In the summer in Tucson, I can't walk 100 feet from a store to my car without soaking through my clothes. Phoenix is worse, temperature wise. If I were in Phoenix and my destination wasn't literally right in front of my stop, I wouldn't be using light rail for my trip.

It's all moot since Phoenix is uninhabitable by humans on a large scale without practices that are unsustainable over the long run. It'll be a ghost town in 50 years.


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## fairviewroad (May 15, 2015)

Aaron said:


> It's all moot since Phoenix is uninhabitable by humans on a large scale without practices that are unsustainable over the long run. It'll be a ghost town in 50 years.


<makes note to dig up this thread in 50 years to make fun of *Aaron* if he's wrong>


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## Aaron (May 16, 2015)

Yeah, it's easy to make predictions when they have a time horizon far enough out that you don't have to worry about being around to take the crap if you're wrong. 50 years from now, I'll be 92, so there is the chance I'll still be here to eat major crow.

Actually, did I say 50 years? I meant 65.


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## Long Train Runnin' (May 18, 2015)

Can I ask what makes you so confident there will be no one in Phoenix by lets just say the end of the century?


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## Bob Dylan (May 18, 2015)

Long Train Runnin said:


> Can I ask what makes you so confident there will be no one in Phoenix by lets just say the end of the century?


Not just Phoenix, Vegas will revert to its previous status as a small western desert town as will "resorts"_like Palm Springs, Laughlin etc.
The reason: Water, the new Oil! There will be a Water War coming ( see the Movie "Chinatown" for reference) and LA and California will win! There's no real reason for those desert towns to exist now that there's Casinos and Golf Courses ( which is a business in decline)everywhere!

To paraphrase the advice given to Benjamin in "The Graduate" about his future: "WATER!"


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## Aaron (May 20, 2015)

Jim nailed it. Water has been the story of the west for pretty much the entire history of American settlement there, although the general populace is still not quite aware of this (even here in the west). Controlling the flow of the waterways and subsequent fights over access to the water there pervades every phase of the build up of the American west.

Humans can't survive without water, and where we are, it just doesn't fall from the sky all that much. What little does fall collects in streams and rivers in the places it falls, and we take that water and divert it for our uses. This works well for small numbers of people, but as the numbers increase, the water available does not. It just doesn't scale. It doesn't help that in addition to the scads of people out here, we're filling up the empty land with farming and ranching, which are both big water consumers.

The once mighty Colorado River now doesn't even empty to the ocean. It's literally sucked dry by the states that it passes through, and ends up a muddy trickle by the time it leaves Arizona. I got to drive past the Colorado River delta in Mexico a couple of years ago, and it's just salty mudflats now.

Changes in water usage patterns along with waste treatment options (like toilet to tap) can buy us some time, but the growth rate is still unsustainable. One might see that as a self-limiting problem, since scarcity of water will just cause the growth to stop. That might be true if it just organically stopped everywhere at the same time. But, if you get some areas that keep growing out of proportion to other areas, the water wars that Jim alludes to will ultimately result in some area no longer getting enough water to support their existing population. I think that's the start of a death spiral for whatever town or county or state that ends up on the losing side of that battle.


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## fairviewroad (May 20, 2015)

Aaron said:


> Actually, did I say 50 years? I meant 65.






Aaron said:


> The once mighty Colorado River now doesn't even empty to the ocean. It's literally sucked dry by the states that it passes through, and ends up a muddy trickle by the time it leaves Arizona. I got to drive past the Colorado River delta in Mexico a couple of years ago, and it's just salty mudflats now.


And Arizonans and Californians wonder why so many people are trying to cross the southern border into their state. When you literally suck dry a major resource, what do you expect.

For a look at what the Colorado River looks like once it enters Mexico, one only has to head over to Google Streetview.


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## Aaron (May 22, 2015)

Coincidentally, this excellent article showed up today in the New Yorker, all about the Colorado River, the negotiating and squabbling over the rights to its water, and the sad state of the river today.

The New Yorker - "The Disappearing River"


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## Shawn Ryu (May 27, 2015)

Anyone try taking light rail to the airport? Do I have to connect to bus?


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## Eric S (May 27, 2015)

I believe you connect from light rail to an airport people mover, but I'd need to double-check that to be sure.


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## Aaron (May 28, 2015)

Shawn Ryu said:


> Anyone try taking light rail to the airport? Do I have to connect to bus?


The light rail has a station at 44th street that's fairly close to the airport. When the light rail was opened, there was no direct connection to the airport, so passengers would have to take shuttle busses. At the end of 2013, the PHX SkyTrain was opened, which is an automated 24 hour train from the 44th street station directly to the airport (or vice versa). It's kind of a cool ride, because it goes right over an active taxiway.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHX_Sky_Train


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## Shawn Ryu (May 29, 2015)

Aaron said:


> Shawn Ryu said:
> 
> 
> > Anyone try taking light rail to the airport? Do I have to connect to bus?
> ...


Nice, so PHX has airport rail connection.


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## Anderson (May 29, 2015)

On the water issue, if I had to guess then in the medium-to-long term we're going to see some truly massive desalinization plants popping up along the West Coast to offset the water use issues.

As to Phoenix, the main issue with going underground is that doing so is _not_ cheap. Subways tend to run $500m+/mile while above-ground light rail tends to run below $100m/mile. Considering the size of Phoenix, this sort of difference adds up _really_ quickly...and this is also a large part of why you almost never hear of a new subway system being built (or even seriously talked about) in the US (I think LA was the most recent city to start one up, and even there the light rail components of the system dwarf the non-light-rail components). Light rail, however, is cheap enough for a lot of places to consider by comparison; if nothing else, you can usually get about 5x as much system for your dollars with it.


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