Liberal Talk Radio

Somewhere in the nexus between voter referenda, free market principles, urban growth formulas and plain-old finger wagging emerges a new American Western philosophy. See, for example, this article in the Phoenix New Times about building the city’s new light rail line:

You, the customer, carry most of the responsibility for preserving the businesses you like that are trying to weather the light-rail storm.

Now is the time to dive into that turbulent sea of dirt piles and traffic jams and support your favorite eatery, retail shop or chiropractor. The businesses want you to pay a visit. With the emphasis on pay.

But if the parking problems are too much for you, don’t worry. There are customers who are willing to frequent the construction-ravaged areas, no matter what. Always have been. So if the construction is over when Metro Rail officials say it will be and the trains are running in two years, odds are, the place you love will still be in business.

The light-rail project came about partly because it was feared that, without it, the densest part of the Valley would face gridlock. There was also the desire to help poor or disabled non-drivers. And there was also the belief that light rail would be a cool amenity that would spark more interest in downtown Phoenix. For instance, it will be easy for all those ASU students to venture into Phoenix’s urban core.

Light rail isn’t perfect.

There are no plans for it to go to the airport.

It’s obscenely expensive — nearly $4 billion for the first 47 miles. The operating cost alone is $28 million a year, and riders will only pay a quarter of that. It may never pay for itself.

Even with the planned extensions, the Valley’s north-south corridors will be poorly served by light rail. Valley residents far from the metro area’s core will have little need to board light rail except as a novelty ride.

But at full capacity, Metro says its system will move as many people per hour as a six-lane freeway.

The extensions, forecast to open from 2012 to 2025, will shoot the trains west to 79th Avenue on Interstate 10 and north of Paradise Valley up State Route 51.

And, for businesses, there are all those potential dividends Mayor Gordon talks about.

One thing is for sure: There’s no use bitching now.

Voters approved light rail, and now it’s here to stay.

Taking the specific issue of light rail out of the picture (and I’m beginning to think that light rail is an Upkeeping Jones feature — like providing wi-fi in the park or, more sinisterly, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day), but there’s a finger-wagging tone about this piece that I think is indicative of where we’re going in the U.S. Don’t like it? Well why did you vote for it then? That kind of thing.

Just the other day on the Brian Lehrer Show (mp3), Paul Berman was on to talk about how much all of us are to blame for what’s going on in Iraq now. I don’t know about Paul Berman — he, after all, actually did do something to argue one way or another about the war — but what exactly did I do to bring about war in Iraq? I’m not on the Defense Policy Board. I’m not an op-ed writer. When it came to Iraq, I generally trusted that our decision makers had some sort of reason to engage Saddam militarily. At the time — 2002, 2003 — what they were saying certainly made sense. But to say I’m somehow to blame for sectarian violence in Baghdad in 2006 is a little strange. Not to mention awfully self inflating. There’s a limit to what a voter can do, after all. (The episode, by the way, is pretty entertaining: you might enjoy, as I did, listening to earnest anti-war types insist that they knew — from the beginning! — that this was a debacle. Oh, OK. Good for you then. You should probably go be Bob Herbert then, you douche.)

But back to light rail . . . it’s interesting — in a slightly naive way — to think that everything negative about Phoenix’s light rail project (and the article is generally positive about light rail, though I’m not sure why) is “our fault”:

It’s helpful to keep one thing in mind while dodging barricades and rolling at two miles per hour single-file with other motorists through Construction City:

We brought this on ourselves.

The apparent chaos on the streets started at the polls.

With transportation a growing concern in 1985, Maricopa County voters agreed to pay for dozens of miles of new freeways by raising the sales tax half a cent for 20 years. The vote also created Valley Metro, which organized bus service and looked into trains as a future mass-transit option.

Four years later, in 1989, voters killed the ambitious, $10 billion ValTrans proposal that would have built — among other things — 103 miles of elevated commuter trains around the Phoenix metro area.

There is the possibility that the ValTrans proposal was simply a bad idea, but that’s neither here nor there (literally!).

Like I alluded above, I think this finger wagging will prove to be more of a New American Southwest/West characteristic than nationwide. In New York City, for example, no one seems to blame the voter that he or she somehow personally failed to build the Second Avenue Subway. And although there’s something refreshing about the New American Finger Wagging, I can see it becoming pretty old pretty quick.