From: "Friends of Transit" To: Subject: Phoenix Public Transit gets upgrade Date: Tuesday, September 03, 2002 4:39 PM Phoenix Public Transit gets upgrade By William Hermann The Arizona Republic Sept. 03, 2002 PHOENIX - Because more and more folks are riding buses, Phoenix Public Transit officials are moving quickly to improve transit stations and park-and-ride facilities and to put more buses on the road. By next spring, they'll have built a new transit center, three new park-and-ride facilities and added hundreds of shaded parking spots at existing park-and-ride locations. Phoenix Public Transit also will have put security stations and security cameras at five city-owned park-and-rides. And they'll have bought 56 new rapid-transit buses. Phoenix Public Transit Director Ed Zuercher said ridership on Valley Metro buses has increased about 20 percent in two years. Phoenix is, with nine other Valley cities, a member of Valley Metro, the regional transit system. "We have been trying to address issues of why people weren't riding the bus, and now that more people are riding, we want to make bus use easier, more convenient, and get even more people out of their cars and on the buses," Zuercher said. Until two years ago little money was available to improve bus services, he said. "For a long time we had bare-bones facilities as a result of cobbling together the fairly modest general funds from the city and grant funds we were getting," he said. But those "bare bones" days changed two years ago. With voters passing the Phoenix Transit Plan in March 2000, with its revenue engine of a 0.4 percent sales tax, Phoenix Transit income went up about $90 million a year. The effort to upgrade facilities and buses begun two years ago now is going into high gear, Zuercher said. Reed Caldwell is deputy public transit director and in charge of upgrading facilities. He said the next few months will see progress in making transit centers and park-and-ride facilities more "customer friendly." Caldwell said adding covered parking, security stations and security cameras at park-and-rides, "is the kind of thing that has great impact. "If you know your car isn't going to be 115 degrees inside when you get into it, and if you know a guard is watching it and cameras are on it while you're at work, you're a lot more likely to leave it in our lot and ride the bus." Zuercher and Caldwell said they expect to keep adding park-and-ride amenities and transit centers and expect to continue expanding the bus fleet so that on that biggest of all days for public transit in the Valley, when the light rail system opens in 2006, the bus line is ready to play its part in a grand transit scheme. "We expect the bus lines and the light rail line to complement one another," Zuercher said. "People will get off the light rail, get on a bus, ride a short distance, and be at work," he said. "If we can make that work, and we will, then we'll finally have very significant numbers of people in the Valley using our public transit system," Zuercher said.