The headline on azcentral.com today sure got our attention: "Light-rail riders who don't pay will be fined $500."
That's a whole lot more for the same offense than people pay in other cities. For example, New York City charges scofflaws who "jump the turnstile" only $100, bumping up the fine last summer from $60.
Then we noticed the article by veteran Arizona Republic reporter Kerry Fehr-Snyder dilutes the strong headline with the phrase "up to $500 plus court fees..."
We checked in with Metr
If these two were around today in P-town, the knuckledraggin' KTAR-types'd shoot 'em on sight: Keith Haring (above) and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Ah, let the provincialism roll like a mighty wave of something brown through our benighted Valley, where every time someone hacks a loogie or lets fly an air biscuit on the new Metro Light Rail, it makes the evening news. And so shall it be, ad nauseam: the first collision with a bluehair, the first time a rail-snoozing inebriate gets decapitated, the f
For the uninitiated, "Arpayaso" is a play on the word "payaso," which means "clown" in Spanish.Do you need another reminder that you live in a police state controlled by Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his brown-shirted goons? If so, just take a trip on the Valley Metro Light Rail, which our clownish top constable says he'll be using to transport inmates downtown, assuming this is not all some sort of pathetic joke on Arpayaso's part.Metro Light Rail doesn't think it's a joke. I phoned Hillary Foose, the
A few citations have already been handed out to freeloaders trying to ride the light rail without paying the fare, says Valley Metro spokesman Hillary Foose. She expects to provide the number to media outlets next week.
"The number of people who have been fare-evading has been extremely minimal, and so have the number of citations," Foose tells New Times.
As previously reported in this blog, getting busted on a light rail train without a ticket c
Sure, one way to look at it is that light-rail ridership "is off to a positive start," as a Valley Metro news release opines. Or, as the Arizona Republic put it this morning in a headline, "Rail ridership tops expectations."That's the glass-half-full version of the story.In fact, the "average weekday ridership" of nearly 31,000 people is about 60 percent of what the trains could carry.True, it took people in other parts of the country a few years to warm up to their light-rail systems, but light
The electric bill for the Metro light rail system is slightly different than yours, naturally.
For one thing, it's not just one bill -- it's about 125 separate bills. There are bills for each station, bills for the juice in the overhead lines that make the 90-foot-long, 50-ton rail cars move around, bills for the lights in the park-and-ride lots and bills for the system's operations center.Metro officials say they're still sorting through all those bills and still don't know exactly what li
Average daily boardings of the Valley's light-rail system dropped in March -- a bad sign with the heat of summer and a substantial fare hike still weeks away.Stats just released by Metro Light Rail estimate that 972,962 riders boarded the system in March. That's an average daily boarding of 31,386 -- fewer people than in February.
Average weekday and average Saturday ridership fell, too. The only positive news -- if you could call it that -- was in the Sunday and holiday ridership, which sa
Image: Metro Light Rail
You can help guide the Valley's transportation future at a public forum on Wednesday to discuss how the light-rail system will connect and run alongside Interstate 10 West.
The sequel to the successful launch of the 20-mile starter line is still in the planning phase, but Metro expects light rail to be blazing down Interstate 10 by 2019.
The agency has identified a "study area" from 7th street to 99th Avenue -- if your house or business is near the freeway you might want
Chatting the other day with Hillary Foose, spokeswoman for Metro Light
Rail, we ran into a dead end of confounding numbers. Goes something
like this:The light rail system has two sets of measurements for freeloaders: The average number of people not properly ticketed, according to ticket inspectors, and the amount of fare that pass card holders should have paid. A major disparity in those numbers seems to As a May 26 article by light rail/global warming reporter Sean Holstege explains, tho
