• capacity: 26,300 cars per day currently drive on 6th Street between Euclid and Campbell; light rail can move more people along the same segment in less than one hour. To put it another way, two Light Rail tracks carry the same capacity as 16 lanes of freeway.

• efficiency: Approximately 200 people can comfortably fit into a typical 160-foot-long light rail two-car configuration; the same space occupied by parked automobiles would transport no more than 10 people (given typical auto occupancy rates of 1.1-1.2 people per car); fewer when the autos are moving.

• cost: Basic at-grade light rail construction is currently running approximately $20-40 million per mile (including all capital costs, maintenance facilities, and rail cars), while new highway construction has typically cost $40 million per mile or much more. Widening Speedway between Campbell and Alvernon cost $30 million per mile in the early 1990s. County Administrator Chuck Huckleberry has estimated the cost of a crosstown freeway in Tucson to be more than $100 million per mile; that freeway would carry less capacity than the light rail system we are proposing.

• disruption of neighborhoods: Freeway/parkway construction typically requires the destruction of an average of 150 single-family homes per new mile of roadway, while light rail generally doesn’t have to sacrifice any homes; the physical form of a freeway/parkway dramatically divides neighborhoods; light rail at grade unites neighborhoods and serves as a community gathering spot.

• pollution: Freeways/parkways create severe problems with noise pollution, exhaust, and debris in surrounding neighborhoods; light rail cars are exceptionally quiet and non-polluting.

• taking cars off the road: While our existing bus service primarily serves people who have no other options, light rail encourages people who have other options to use public transit and leave their cars at home; in Dallas, surveys show a consistent figure of about 30% of light rail riders diverted from automobiles. In Denver, that figure is 48%; in St. Louis, it is closer to 70%.

• induced traffic: Study after study has shown that building freeways to relieve congestion actually only creates the need for more freeways to reduce congestion; a 1998 study of Phoenix freeways found that every 10% increase in lane capacity generated a 9% increase in congestion. This phenomenon has been remarked upon since the 1920s, and has played itself out again and again.

• politics: As past experience with Aviation Parkway shows, any attempt to push through a crosstown freeway/parkway will meet with powerful, vocal, and varied opposition from neighborhoods and businesses, dividing the community. Conversely, Light Rail will bring the community together as a rallying point.

Phoenix has discovered over the past decades that building more freeways doesn’t solve any problems; it only creates the need to build more freeways. Last year, they found a way to break the cycle: 65% of voters approved a sales tax increase exclusively dedicated to fund transit improvements, with a flagship light rail line leading the way. A broad-based coalition of business, government, and neighborhood leaders from all points on the political spectrum supported the plan, which is now under way and will be ready to ride by 2006.

Building a crosstown east-west or north-south freeway will be a practical and political impossibility. Any discussion of crosstown freeways or parkways would be a divisive issue that would in all probability scuttle any voter-approved plans to improve traffic congestion on the periphery and to implement any sort of dedicated revenue source. Because light rail has been proven to unite communities and can carry more passengers at a lower cost it is the only rational solution for improving traffic flow in the highest density traffic corridors.