If you haven’t been downtown lately, you might not have noticed that the first segments of track for the urban streetcar have been laid in the messy construction zone of the Fourth Avenue underpass.

The good news: Congress Street is scheduled to reopen next month, ending the wack detour we now have when we enter downtown.

The bad news: The underpass construction still has another year or so to go.

This article appears in Feb 14-20, 2008.

Getting hassled by The Man Mild-mannered reporter

4 replies on “On Track”

  1. WHY DO THEY HAVE A STRETT CAR TO GO IN A MODERN CITY THERE SHOULD BE A PEOPLE MOVER AND IT SHOULD BE THE MODERN TYPE NOT A CHOO-CHOO THAT GOES IN THE UNDERPANTS. WHAT IS TUCSON AN OLD CITY OR THE CITY OF THE FUTURE WELL LET ME TELL YOU THE FUTURE IS NOW AND NOW IS THE PASSED AND UNDERPANTS. TEAR DOWN THE DECONSTRUCTION AND MAKE READY FOR THE NEW TRANSPORT OF YOUR PUBLIC HALLUCINATION.

  2. Brad, the all-caps is making me hallucinate. Check out the third key up from the bottom left of your pecking board. Usually reads “caps lock”. It makes the big letters go back to small ones. With that said. I would have to agree with you about that city’s need to invest in public mass transit. I may be corrected here, but I believe that was not the intent of the new trolley rails being set in downtown Tucson. The trolley is mostly novelty, designed to carry tourists and hipsters around downtown.

    Phoenix and and some of its satellite cities have laid down track for a light-rail system. Miles of it. As much as I’m going to enjoy the cosmopolitan “feel” it will give the areas through which the trains run, it still does not fulfill the notion of “mass transit”. Just not enough mass. These types of plans (Light rail, trolley, etc.) are great, but are generally set up to fail. And failure for these type projects is not the same as when a business fails and its doors are shut. These transit projects are kept alive (and barely) at taxpayer expense then develop bad reputations (not clean, not fast, not convenient enough). Why would that happen to our shiny new rail system? Urban sprawl. As long as we continue unchecked expansion of our city’s boundaries, we will never be able to lay enough track to serve ANY of those people. I’m not convinced that moving bodies from Tempe for downtown PHX is enough for me. I would love to see the “suit,” that just got a place in Queen Creek but chucks paper in Mid-Town PHX for a living, park his 4×4 Thundra MegaXL-i and TAKE THE TRAIN. A real fucking train that gets his fat ass to downtown in 15 minutes. THAT is mass transit.

  3. My irrational objection to the trolley is this: wires in the air. It’s more visual pollution, clutter overhead. It’s bad enough that we still have utility lines overhead along many of the sidewalks; just look at how junky the sky over Fourth Avenue seems because of the trolley wires. Can’t they fit the trolleys with battery-powered motors?

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