Our brand-new light rail system is already raising its price per ride. Hasn’t been running two months, and the price is going up a buck, from $1.25 (one way!) to $2.25. I’m sure that won’t be the first increase.
The other evening one of my RAs, who doesn’t own a car, rode the train up to M’hijito’s house to meet me so I could chauffeur him to an Arizona Book Publishing Association shindig. He said it took an hour to get from lovely downtown Tempe to the corner of Seventh Avenue and Camelback. That’s a 20-minute drive in your car.
At the current rate, would it be cost-effective for me to ride the train, once the city has torn down an entire row of homes and trashed the property values in my neighborhood so they can run the train tracks up the road that demarcates this neighborhood from the bland slums just to the west? Assuming the rate stays the same, at $5 per round trip?
Let us calculate:
My house is 18 miles from the campus. Coincidentally, my car gets about 18 miles a gallon if I’m not hypermiling. (If I drive very carefully, I can push it up to around 25 mpg, but let’s assume I’m keeping up with traffic and not driving my fellow homicidal drivers crazier than they already are.)
Assume gas prices stay at $1.70 a gallon. Assume the train ride stays at $2.25 one-way, $5.00 round trip. Because I have a disabled parking sticker, I can park in any metered space in Tempe for free, so I do not pay GDU’s $780/year parking fee. Let’s also assume I go out to campus 5 days a week and I take 3 weeks of vacation time.
Thus: The cost of gas for a round trip is $3.40 a day. I commute 5 days a week for 49 weeks, or 245 days a year.
$3.40 x 245 = $833 a year: Cost of driving for a person with a disabled sticker.
$833 + $780 = $1,613 a year: Cost of driving for a person who has not discovered you can park for free with a disabled sticker, or who buys a parking space within a mile of the office
Okay. If the train costs $5.00 per round trip:
$5 x 245 = $1,225 a year: Cost of riding the train
Not too bad: only $392 a year more than I’m presently paying. That doesn’t take into account the wear and tear on my car. However, my car, being a Toyota, does not cost anywhere near $392 a year for upkeep and repairs.
It also doesn’t take into account the two hours you would spend in transit: 80 minutes more time wasted in transit than you would kill sitting in an automobile each day. That’s 19,600 minutes a year, 326.67 more hours of your life wasted in a train than in a car!
Does anyone seriously think people are going to ride this train for real commutes from the outer reaches of the Valley? If I bought a house in one of the now-bankrupt new suburbs out by the White Tanks or halfway to Prescott, the number of miles I would have to commute would triple. So would the time spent in transit.
In the unlikely event that the train fare stays constant, clearly the longer your commute the more you would save on gas. However, the end of the line will be about six blocks from my house. If you lived out at the White Tanks or up in Anthem, you’d have to drive all the way into the middle of town, anyway. By the time you get this far, you only have another 20 minutes to drive. Your air-conditioning has made the car nice and cool, and the Park-&-Ride will sit smack in the middle of a high-crime area where your car is likely to be broken into or stolen.
What would you do: park your car in a dangerous lot in 115-degree heat and add another hour to your commute, or keep on truckin’?
I believe GDU pays at least half of the Metro fare when you get an annual pass from them. Before the rate hike, the cost for a GDU employee was about a $1.00 a day. Not sure about now. That might change your calcs. And, you can read on the train or even work on a laptop. So it is possible for you make better use of your time (and perhaps even lower your blood pressure) than you can driving a car up and down the 202, 51, 10, 17. etc.
Beautiful and very relevant analysis of the economics and time involved with the trolley system.
Mary rides the trolley every day, because of where I volunteer it’s not feasible for me. The trolley plus bus system uses up five hours per day for her; add to that eight hours at work at ASU, plus an hour for lunch — and her working day eats up 14 hours. She reads a Kindle on the trolley and the bus; but, she’s still got a mile walk home from the end of the bus route. She had to give up driving because of her eyesight.
What’s the alternative in Phoenix?
Life is not user friendly.
@ Quiet Running: To get the pass, you have to buy a entire year’s worth of tickets, a big chunk of dough upfront. You bet on the come that a) you will in fact use the train every day and b) you will stay employed at GDU for an entire year, something that presently is not a safe bet at all.
and @Ted and Quiet: Presumably the trolley has a lot smoother ride than the bus. The one time I rode the bus to Tempe (a two-hour ride each way, to make the 25-minute drive), the tooth-rattling ride rendered reading and working on a laptop out of the question.
It might be worth advertising on Craig’s list for a carpool partner for Mary. Though obviously she couldn’t trade off driving, she could pitch in with gas, which undoubtedly would be appreciated.
I suppose the annual pass is a risk. The light rail is very smooth and makes reading or working on a laptop possible. It is true that I do not have to drive and park in the unattended lot as I live close to a station but even that is a plus because it provides a reason to consistently walk in the morning and evening. For me, the winter cold is a lot more uncomfortable than the heat of summer. You asked “what would you do? My choice was to leave the car in the garage and take the train. So far, so good.
I’m exactly the other way around: would walk to the (future) station at 19th and Dunlap (if I imagined it were safe to do so, which right now I do not) in the winter but not in the summer. ‘Course, we’ve had a mighty mild winter in aught-eight and aught-nine.
M’hijito lives a quarter-mile from the train line and, if he gets some money and gets admitted to graduate school, plans to ride the train out to the Great Desert University. For him it will be a huge convenience–and if GDU continues to offer free passes for students, it will represent a huge savings. The train goes past several grocery stores between 7th Avenue and Tempe, so in theory he could hop off and pick up some food on his way home. Or he could ride all the way up to the train station at the Target/Costco/Walmart shopping center, which is about the same distance from his house as the 7th & Camelback stop.
With the rumors of widespread layoffs constantly on the wind, I’m skeptical that I will be at GDU long enough to use up a year-long pass. Also, of course, it will be another three years before the leg that goes by my house is built, assuming funding to the thing isn’t cut. So I would have to park my car at my son’s house and walk to the train stop (not on your LIFE would I leave my only vehicle sitting in the park-&-ride at 19th and Montebello!).
It’s not a very safe neighborhood — a good friend was murdered in that area by young gang-bangers who thought it would be funny to beat up a cripple and run their car back and forth over his head several times.
As you can imagine, I feel safer with several layers of metal between me and my fellow human beings. The neighborhood abutting mine, where the new train station will be built, is no better — a couple days after I experimented with the bus, a woman was abducted and raped from the very bus stop where I stood around for a half hour. Even though I’m (mercifully) no longer a pretty young girl, there are psychotics who will attack elderly women because they hate women, and muggers deliberately target the elderly because they see us as weak and unable to resist.
Couple that vulnerability with the inconvenience and cost, and I find myself wishing we could have the government mandate electric cars, please, instead of investing in expensive mass transit that many Americans will never ride.