Our honored civic leaders are engaged in another gambit to degrade the quality of living in our part of town.
One of their favorite projects is the lightrail, a boondoggle that multiplies the cost of public transit, limits it to specific routes (unlike a bus route, a train must stick to the expensively installed train tracks), and hauls derelicts and criminals up to the end of the line and drops them off at the top of our neighborhood.
It’s the stupidest thing you ever saw.
Compare it with a bus line:
* A bus does not need train tracks installed at taxpayer expense.
* Bus lines can go just about anywhere, rather than being confined to routes followed by train tracks.
* A bus line does not require overhead electric lines.
* One bus is a helluva lot cheaper than a passel of train cars.
* The end of the line for a bus service can be in the middle of a gigantic shopping center parking lot, dropping the bums off far from residents’ homes. (We have one of those, just on the other side of the freeway, which itself is about three blocks from the western edge of the ‘Hood.)
* Such a shopping center can house social services, reaching out to the drug-addicted and the brain-addled rather than dumping those unfortunates on a street somewhere. Or into the alleys behind our homes.
Why do such stupid people get into public office? Is “dumb as a post” a requisite quality for those who would be civic leaders?
***
We have a nice park in the middle of our neighborhood. Kids played there, teams played baseball and volleyball, people walked their pets there.
Not so much anymore.
I won’t go in there at all unless a lot of people are around. You just never know what the loafing bums are gonna do.
Well…yeah: you DO know they’re gonna hit you up for a hand-out. And when you refuse, then what are they gonna do?
Ruby the Corgi is too small to be any protection. So…we have no choice but to stay out of the park that my taxes pay for.
Pisseth me off.
If my son were not here in lovely uptown Phoenix, I would move away.
Where?
Probably Fountain Hills, a suburb of Scottsdale. Upscale, clean, relatively free of bums and crime.
Failing that: a suburb of Tucson called Oro Valley.
Both of these are relatively free of transients; relatively low in crime. Both have neighborhoods that aren’t impossibly more pricey than my neighborhood.
Friends have retired to a little ranching town/tourist trap on the Mogollon Rim called Payson. It’s a pleasant enough place, though not to my taste: I don’t care much for small-town living. For me, neighborly nosiness is not entertaining…and I do like having access to at least one or two major department stores and a first-rate gourmet grocer. And, we might add, to the kind of doctors and medical facilities that are attracted to affluent cities.
Ohhh well...time to walk the dog; then get back to work. Ugh!
