Arizona Rail Passenger Association

A year after bus use followed gasoline prices to record highs, ridership has fallen by the millions on the Valley’s most extensive mode of public transit…

While bus ridership was down, more and more commuters climbed aboard light-rail trains in Phoenix, Tempe and Mesa, sending ridership numbers above 12 million for fiscal year 2010. The system had 5.6 million riders for the first six months of its operation, which began in January 2009…

Rest of the story in the Arizona Republic

by Jahna Berry – May. 26, 2010
The Arizona Republic

Phoenix revealed the design of the train cars that will transport millions of passengers around Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport.

Under a $260 million contract with a Canadian firm, Bombardier Transportation Holdings USA, Bombardier will design and build 18 train cars
and a maintenance facility…

Each car is 36.5 feet long, 9.5 feet wide and 11 feet high… Each car can hold about 53 people and each train will have three cars. The first test car will arrive in August 2011…

[The first stage of Sky Train, between Terminal 4, the east economy parking lot and, METRO, will open in 2013.]

From the East Valley Tribune:

Mesa has struggled for years to make its mile-long downtown vibrant, but a new light rail segment is triggering calls to extend the city’s urban core by several miles.

Key city officials say they want to expand the downtown-style streetscape at least two miles to the west, where the Metro system now ends at Sycamore Street.

Nick Davis, whose family owns the Citrus Grove trailer park, [said] “Main Street is ripe for redevelopment if light-rail is built on it and the city incentivizes it. I honestly believe that it can happen if you have a real downtown in Mesa, something that people are really proud of and proud to go down to.”Davis said he was a skeptic of light-rail’s redevelopment potential until watching new businesses sprout up after the initial 20-mile segment opened in late 2008. His family owns a plaza in Phoenix at 4700 N. Central Ave., which is south of Camelback Road. Davis said that part of Central enjoys much of the life that downtown Phoenix has, demonstrating a large amount of redevelopment can take place over a wide area.

The economy could make redevelopment tougher now, but Davis said he’s encouraged by how quickly light-rail improved an area he recalls as lifeless growing up in the 1980s and ’90s…

Dated 2010-05-17. Rest of the story here.

Full story by Sean Holstege in the Arizona Republic, 14 April 2010

Changing demographics, ridership patterns point to different lines in future

Regional planners are mapping new light-rail lines in places that were inconceivable a few years ago, as they grapple with how urban Arizona takes shape in the coming half-century.

Preliminary studies show that sufficient demand will exist for light rail to succeed on 44th Street, Camelback Road, south Central Avenue, Bell Road and other routes not previously planned, building a web far more expansive than what is currently envisioned…

Enough people would board a train in the Valley’s suburbs that a future commuter-rail system would be as popular as some of the busiest lines in the West, new studies have found.

A trio of yearlong rail studies, in nearly final form, indicates commuter rail could carry almost 18,000 passengers a day by 2030. Planners at the Maricopa Association of Governments say, based on the findings, they favor a 105-mile, X-shaped system that could feature 33 stations and cost roughly $1.5 billion. That’s a little more than the Valley’s 20-mile, light-rail starter line.

The commuter-rail network would use existing freight track through downtown Phoenix
, with lines from Queen Creek to Buckeye and from Chandler to Wittmann…

Rest of the story in the Arizona Republic