Phoenix Public Transportation - History

History

From its founding in 1867 as a farming and ranching community, Phoenix relied on horseback travel and stagecoaches for transportation. A scheduled stagecoach line was implemented along Washington Street, the community's main east-west artery for most of its early history, in 1887 by businessman Moses Sherman. Service was expanded, and a fully electrified system of streetcars was in place a few years later. This system was the Phoenix Street Railway. Financial problems became serious enough for Sherman to sell the company to the city government in the 1920s. New investment by the city expanded both streetcar and bus service and several private bus lines were also in place. A fire destroyed most of the streetcars in 1947, and the city decided to focus on buses as the means of providing public transit.

Like other cities in the western United States, Phoenix grew into a large city during the automotive era. The city's initial transportation plan was the use of "super-streets" laid out in a grid plan developed along section lines. When this did not work as planned, the city began building a freeway network during the 1980s. Despite the transportation problems, public transport was not seriously considered to solve the city's traffic problems until the 1990s. Throughout the 1990s, Phoenix was repeatedly chosen as having the worst public transport among US cities.

In 1985, the Regional Public Transportation Authority (RPTA) was created through a law passed by the Arizona State Legislature. This law enabled the citizens of Maricopa County to vote on a sales-tax increase which would fund regional freeway improvements and create the RPTA. In October of that year, Maricopa County voters approved a half-cent sales tax to fund freeway construction with a portion (or $5 million per year, adjusted annually for inflation) as seed money for regional-transit-service expansion. The RPTA received this funding through 2005 and was charged with developing a regional transit plan, finding a dedicated funding source for transit, and developing and operating a regional transit system.

The population of the greater Phoenix area is projected to grow by 50 percent. To enable transportation of new residents throughout the Phoenix metropolitan area a 26-member citizens' transit committee (with the support of the mayor and the city council) met, and a public-transit plan was formulated. The right to organize was initiated by city-council members who were also community members. The public-transit plan was implemented on March 14, 2000, and called for expansion of the bus system and light-rail service. In addition to the committee, public input was fundamental to the plan's execution; surveys were conducted, and 10 public meetings were held throughout the city. The survey was given to 48,000 households, chosen at random, included with the residents' water bills; 3,600 residents responded.

In 2004, Maricopa County residents extended the half-cent county sales tax originally authorized in 1985. The tax allocates over one-third of tax revenues ($5.8 billion before inflation) for transit, including light rail. The city has dramatically expanded its public transportation services early in the 21st century, including the opening of a light-rail line in 2008.