11. There's a new ride in town
The new streetcar is here and free for the first year! Take a ride with Brittany and Madeline as they talk with Tempe Mayor Corey Woods about the conception of streetcar through its launch. Then John Graham, Chairman and CEO of Sunbelt Holdings, joins the episode to discuss how developers and business owners in the area helped make streetcar a reality.
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Transcript
Have you ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes of your daily commute?
Madeline:Or how transportation impacts the community you call home?
Brittany:Maybe you want to explore outside your community and don't know where to start.
Madeline:Well, you're in luck because this is where you hop on.
Brittany:I'm Brittany Hoffman.
Madeline:And I'm Madeline Phipps.
Brittany:We work in communications for Valley Metro and together we'll discover all the ways that public transit enhances lives across the cities we serve.
Madeline:And we might even make some new friends along the way.
Brittany:Welcome to Storylines.
Hey, Maddie.
Madeline:Hey Brittany.
Brittany:Do you know what's green, good for the earth and good for your wallet?
Madeline:Money?
Brittany:The Valley Metro streetcar!
Madeline:Ooooh. Duh! Hahaha.
Brittany:Maddie you're going green. I mean, you get on a green vehicle, it's good for the environment, obviously important as our temperatures continue to rise here in the Valley, and it's free. That's definitely good.
Madeline:Doesn't really get better than that. Also, it might be the coolest new ride in town. Did you know that in the first month that it operated, so beginning May 20th, there were 23,775 boardings of the streetcar in Tempe?
Brittany:Oh my goodness. Maddie, that means there were 23,000 trips that people took and they got to go explore Tempe, go to their destinations that they needed to, whether it was school, businesses in the area… Maybe they were just looking at the art even. There's so much cool art on the streetcar line, too.
Madeline:That's right there is. There are four different artists featured on the streetcar line at all of its stops. So, there's a lot to do, a lot to see, a lot to explore.
Brittany:Obviously you and I are very excited about streetcar, but I think that we need to hear from the people who made it all happen. There was definitely a lot of planning that went into this. It was not just an easy thing to get streetcar into Tempe. So, I know I'm excited to learn about how it got here and where it's going in the future.
Woods:I'm Corey Woods, mayor of the city of Tempe. I've been mayor for almost two years now, but this is my 10th year in city government, cause I was on the city council for eight years prior.
Madeline:We've just celebrated the official opening of the streetcar in Tempe just a couple weeks ago. Will you tell us a little bit why the streetcar is important for the region and for the city of Tempe?
Woods:I think the streetcar is critically important because the city of Tempe is a true multimodal city, between light rail, bus, rapid transit, and now modern streetcar. With Maricopa County being the fastest growing county in the entire country, Tempe being the ninth largest city in the state, we have a population of about 193,000 people that swells to over 300,000 during the average workday, because we're a tremendous net importer of jobs, I think that it's critically important that we have other modes of transportation that can get people around, whether it's to and from work or just around from a perspective of leisure. And so, we have to figure out ways to address traffic congestion, sustainability issues, such as greenhouse gas emissions, and I do think that the more people we have riding alternative modes of transportation, the better off both of those things are going to be.
So the streetcar is a very important asset in our transit kind of wheelhouse, and I'm just very excited that it's actually up and running.
Brittany:So, you already mentioned a couple of the heavy hitting points that we have the fastest growing county, that the city swells every workday, and obviously climate change is a huge impact to our region. Why is streetcar so important for the future as well, not just this moment?
Woods: started my first term back in:But some of the conversation that we had with residents was sort of confusing, I think to a lot of people, I don't understand why you're building this small stretch sort of in and around the downtown. And the point we were trying to make was it will connect to other modes of transportation, such as the light rail, which already was in existence in Tempe, but we do think it's going to serve as a starter line. And once people see the success of the modern streetcar in the city of Tempe, you'll have other communities that will also want to join in to make sure we can have connections to their communities as well, then truly making it a regional transportation system.
Already we've been having a lot of conversations with the city of Mesa about taking the current line that we have now fully operational in Tempe and going east on Rio Salado Parkway to potentially connect over to the Cubs stadium. And so that would make it a true regional system connecting both cities of Tempe and Mesa.
It's not a system that's just meant to move around people of the downtown or move around ASU students, as many people have sometimes wrongly said. It's a starter line that's intended to grow into a much bigger system that will connect even more parts of Tempe and will connect us to other surrounding communities.
And so, I'm very excited about that. I think it's a very, very cool innovation and I'm glad we were frankly the first, but I think that's always the challenge. When you want to be the innovators, when you want to be first, sometimes that creates some confusion. It's almost like buying the new iPhone, even though I'm an Android user, but it's a good example to use.
There are the people who will stand on line and sit there for 10 hours waiting to get the new iPhone as soon as the Apple store opens up. And then you have some people who say, you know, I'm gonna wait three or four weeks and make sure there aren't any bugs with this thing, because I don't want to buy something that might end up being a dud.
We tend to be more in the former category as Tempe residents and less in the latter. When we see something that we think is a really significant innovation that could move our city forward in a very positive way and connect us to the region, address sustainability issues, address traffic congestion issues, we are totally happy to jump on board pun, absolutely intended.
Madeline:We've only been really operating passenger service a couple weeks. but in that time, what kind of feedback have you heard from businesses or community members about what they think of streetcar?
Woods:Oh, I hear nothing but positive. And I think that's part of why you have to have the courage of your convictions when you're working on things such as streetcar, because there were definitely quite a few naysayers when it first time, we still have naysayers. I mean I have a very active social media presence and you'll see people make somewhat negative statements.
But what I'm also now seeing though, are the positive statements far outweigh probably by two to one. I'll bump into people on the street now, or people who will send me little Facebook messenger notes or text messages saying, “Hey, just want to let you know the new streetcar's up and running it and I've already been on it more than one time. And I'm really, really enjoying it. I'm really glad the city of Tempe has this.”
But that's the inherent challenge of trying to go first with certain things is that you have to do a very good job of explaining exactly why you're doing it, what the benefits are.
But I can absolutely tell you that in the short amount of time that the streetcar has been fully operational in and around the downtown Tempe area, I've had many residents and business people who've utilized it and told me how happy they are to have this right in the middle of our city. So, I think already it's proven to be a huge success.
Also, I mean it's free for the entire first year. We're trying to get people accustomed to and used to riding it. So, we wanted to make sure that we offered that incentive, so people really get comfortable with the streetcar and continue to ride it for years afterwards. It's very exciting and everything I've heard from the business community and people who've lived here for a long time, is overwhelmingly positive.
You're always gonna have a few people who don't like it and want to continue talking about it, but the overwhelming majority of people that I've spoken to are very happy about this. And I think they're happy that a lot of the people who ran the city had the foresight to bring this innovation to Tempe.
Brittany:Speaking of foresight, you were on the city council when conversations were first starting about Tempe Streetcar. So can you take us through your history of streetcar all the way to launch day?
Woods:Oh man. Yeah, I could tell you. I remember when we were first beginning to have conversations about this. It was council member Shannon Ellis was really the person, when I first got on council, who was the leader when it came to Streetcar. And she was the one who really saw the vision for what Streetcar could bring to the city of Tempe when it came to value.
And so I remember, it was challenging. I mean, we had to do a lot of work with the Federal Transit Administration. We were working a lot with Congressman Harry Mitchell, who was our representative at that point, trying to make sure that we could get the federal dollars of the support that we needed to make this happen.
We had to do a lot of work with the business community in downtown. There was actually a pretty substantial funding gap when we first sort of conceived this project and the downtown property owners chose to raise their own property assessments for the purpose of actually filling that gap, which I believe was somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 to 13 million dollars.
That's how much they saw this creating true value in their neck of the woods, because what they know is that fixed rail lines really do show people that you are committing to permanent investment and reinvestment in an area. And I think they all believed in the future of the streetcar and what it could bring, how it could stabilize revenues in the downtown, making them more successful, and of course, therefore more profitable.
out it. But now that we're in:But other than that, the majority of comments, eight or nine out of ten people that I see engaging on social media, where the streetcar is a topic of conversation are talking about it in a very positive light.
Brittany:Leaders on the council brought the vision and the business community stepped up to help fill the funding gap. How important was the P3 or public private partnership to making streetcar a reality?
Woods:P3 partnerships, are critically important. The government can't do everything. We try. We want to provide people with services and value for their tax dollars and make sure people can live very healthy, fulfilled lives.
But at the end of the day, you do have to have a good symbiotic relationship with your business community, because the revenues that are generated in, through the point of sale and that's how you actually pay for all the things that people actually want in your community. Trash pickup, fire services, police services, all of these things are paid for through people's tax dollars, typically, through sales taxes or bed taxes, which are through hospitality.
And so, the reality is you need to work with your business partners, one, to get a really good sense as to what they need to run and operate successful businesses. But also, it's just critical, even when it comes to things like, you know, as I talked about before with funding gaps, if they really see the benefit in something and they understand what it could possibly bring, many times they are willing to step forward and put up the money that will help to close a substantial funding gap or they'll help to connect you to other people that might help to get a project across the finish line. So, the reality is I think those business relationships are critically important, but those business relationships that you have that are preexisting are what lead to these public private partnerships that can get very important projects like the streetcar built.
Madeline:So just to finish this off here, what is your favorite stop on the streetcar line or your favorite place to shop or dine along the line that you take the streetcar to?
Woods:The one right by my place. So I live right around, Fifth, Sixth street and Maple. I am an actual downtown Tempe resident. And so, the stop right around that Fifth and Sixth Street portion on Mill Avenue, I think it's right in front of the old Harkins Valley Art Theater, that's the stop that I actually like the most, because it's the one that actually goes right to Tempe City Hall, and the one where I can just head a little bit west and go right to my place. So, that is my favorite stop because it leads to all the places that are critically important to me, my home and of course my office where I'm sitting right now.
