Leaping into Light Rail

Cities in the South and West are writing a new chapter in the history of transit — and in the stories of themselves.

Hey! What do you know? It’s cold!"

Rick Simonetta isn’t talking about the temperature in downtown Phoenix, which today is 92 degrees in the shade. What’s cold is the water he’s sipping from a fountain on the platform of an outdoor train station. Right now, the platform is eerily devoid of passengers, its modern, sage-colored ironwork glinting in the Southwestern sun. But come December, when Phoenix opens its first light-rail line, this station will anchor a huge regional transit system that will stretch north to Glendale and east to Mesa and Tempe. It’s a $1.4 billion, 20-mile catapult into transit — no other light-rail system in the country has been so large right from its inception.

July 2008 By ZACH PATTON

Full Story: http://governing.com/articles/0807rail.htm