The Losers' Last Chance Saloon is actually a British-themed pub, oddly suited to the occasion. Like Colonel Blimp's mourning the end of empire, true believers in the primacy of the automobile suffer from a nasty, anti-imperial blow.
The most conservative big city in the country voted March 14 to build a mass-transit system. The ferociously anti-tax precincts of the desert have surrendered much of their cowboy heritage. By a margin of 65 percent, Phoenix ditched ideology to raise its sales tax from 7.1 percent to 7.5 percent, creating a multibillion-dollar fund to double the bus fleet, restore Sunday bus service (after a 60-year absence), and to build a trolley line down its main drag.Other Sun Belt cities learned long ago that light-rail vehicles can ease traffic. Trolleys have enhanced life in San Diego, San Jose and Sacramento, but Phoenix remained in stubborn thrall to its auto-dominant philosophy as late as 1997. A referendum that year defeated a transit tax by just 122 votes. Since then, commuting Phoenicians have had ample time, sitting in traffic, to reconsider.
An anti-tax attitude has historically ruled the nation's seventh-largest city. But as the Valley of the Sun slowly became the Valley of the Smog, not even anti-tax editorials in The Wall Street Journal could dispel the gloom or move the traffic. (The Arizona Republic's editorials heartily urged a yes vote on Proposition 2000.)
In 1997, opponents of transit cheered. This year, anti-tax warriors drowned their sorrows at the George and Dragon, a pub on Central Avenue, a street which trolley cars will traverse by 2006. "It is really the voters who have lost, big-time," said Becky Fenger of De-Rail the Tax, noting that her group was outspent heavily. True enough, her $10,000 budget was no match for the $1.4 million raised by corporate interests weary of watching their work force idling on the off-ramps.
Phoenix has been both victim and beneficiary of geography. When the Interstate Highway System was planned, Arizona's capital had just 107,000 people. A program with 90 percent federal funding somehow met more favor here than most Washington-based plans. Fields of cacti fell to the federal bulldozer, and Routes 17 and 10 met little resistance. The city now has 1.2 million residents, a number expected to double in the next 40 years.
In Denver, the Rockies don't tumble. Tucson is surrounded on four sides by mountains. Albuquerque's growth must cope with the majestic Sandia range. Phoenix, less hemmed in, sprawled over less challenging barriers until it encountered its own tapped-out, traffic-clogged transportation philosophy -- or lack thereof.
The notion of limits still seems alien hereabouts. When gasoline prices rise, grumbling quickly infests radio shows and letters to the editor. Right-wingers and left-wingers alike subscribe to a conspiracy theory that $2 a gallon must be a plot. Reaction is more muted when the water bills arrive. When residents average 175 gallons a day, Phoenicians realize their supply is finite. Water and sewer rates have escalated 2 percent annually since 1994 to a monthly average of $29 per household.
Transit is one way of recognizing limits, even if it means swallowing the distasteful ideological task of subsidizing someone else's ride on the bus. Many residents emigrated to the desert to escape Chicago's Loop, New York's subways or Boston's T. But by the time a 12-mile trolley line starts operating, Phoenix may be happy to shed its image of a cloverleaf-clogged imitator of other car-crazed cities. By 2006, it will no longer be Los Angeles without the beaches or Houston without the charm.
Imitation is the sincerest form of transit. After the vote, when Phoenix Mayor Skip Rimsza hollered "All aboard!" the suburbs of Tempe and Scottsdale quickly asked to join the new system. A Wells Fargo stagecoach never had a more eager welcome.