This week in his column in Inside Tucson Business (which shares office space, a coffee machine and ownership with the Weekly), David Hatfield asks why the city is building a streetcar system when a monorail system is much cooler and safer.
But as Tucson nears cashing in that giant federal check, I can’t help but wonder: Is any transit project still worth it since the Rio Nuevo museum district has been put on indefinite hold?
In any case, I’m sure the decision to continue the streetcar project looked something like this:
This article appears in Feb 25 – Mar 3, 2010.
Street car, light rail, monorail, what Tucson needs is a subway. LOL.
I already thought of this episode, when I was listening to the Mayor and City Council talking about this major waste of taxpayer money at Maynard’s Market.
I’m not sure what’s wrong with the people in Tucson, but we desperately need something in this city. I spent a lot of time in a REAL city with nice public transportation including a light rail system. It was great.
Here in Tucson the cynics at the faux progressives at the Tucson Weekly seem as intent on saying “no” to anything to help the city as Republicans are in Congress about healthcare.
If I don’t want to take my care to my doctor’s office, I have one choice… a bus. That trip takes almost 3 hours from my home… when I can drive it in under 25 minutes. Obviously, we need something in this city besides diesel belching, traffic snarling, and really really slow… buses.
RFS,
What would help you and the rest of Tucson would be a city loop that circles the outskirts of the city. We need a rail system that brings people that live in the outskirts into downtown to work, shop and visit. We need more restrictive laws against urban sprawl. When we do build a new subdivision, the city or country will already have plans on how to connect it to the city transit system.
I would love to see the beginnings of a system similar to the Chicago Metropolitan area. When I used to live in that area, I love how I could drive to a bus station, then take it to the south shore line, and get dropped off at the El. Where then I could go basically anywhere in the business area of Tucson.
If they were using this money to start with a process of building a independent light rail system, and they showed how this will start a 50 year modernization of our public transit system. I would be completely for the use of this amount of money. However, having a rail system that using existing roads (basically a bus on a track), using 50 million dollars to make a bridge higher for a obsolete trolley, are not ways to modernize our public transportation system.
What about making the rail system be in the middle of Aviation? Aviation already has a middle divider where you can put the track. We could start it around the airport and have it go north into downtown. Then we could build a second line running down Valencia with stops by the numerous subdivisions finally ending at Houghton and Rita. Then people in Vail, Sonoita, Patagonia, Sierra Vista, and all the other communities southeast of Tucson could park at Houghton and take the street car to the airport and downtown.
The second phase would be a rail system that parallels I-10 going north to Marana. So people from Marana, Oro Valley, and Oracle communities could take public transportation all the way to downtown and the airport. They could put the station around Tangerine Road.
The Third phase could parallel Sunrise along the foot hills and head south to connect with the other rails downtown.
I understand that is would will take many years, but I would like to see some type of plan from the city about how they are going to bring Tucson into the 21 Century. The key to any successful transit system is to connect downtown, outskirts, and most importantly the airport into the system. It is a bad idea to use a modern street car that does not have an independent line. They are basically just building a bus on a track that will slow down traffic. That is hardly worth hundreds of millions of dollars.