In Defense of Valley Metro Phoenix

A couple posts ago I recounted a frustrating and discouraging bus experience, and while I think it’s important to be completely honest in this blog about my transition to carelessness, I’m concerned I may have given the impression I don’t support or endorse Phoenix’s Valley Metro system.

Nothing could be further from the truth. I love Phoenix and frequently tell anyone who asks about being carless how great Phoenix’s public transportation system is. 

I defend the city’s transit system ad nauseum online on multiple social media platforms including Quora, Facebook and Nextdoor. I point naysayers towards My Sidewalk forums asking for user feedback and whenever possible give concrete examples of how that feedback is integrated with the city’s transit plans.

So it seems like a post listing everything I respect and like about the city’s public transit system is in order. 

Scroll down for the listcicle; keep reading for the context.

Why people think it sucks, when it really doesn’t

There’s always going to be riders who are never going to be happy no matter what. Yet in most cases I find unhappy transit users just need better information, whether it’s why certain protocols are in place or how to become more involved in the process that creates the transit system in the first place.

That's right! You can help shape your bus schedule! 

For example:

Well, Joe Internet Complainer, Valley Metro can’t “just” increase the frequency of your bus because they’d have to pay for the additional gas and increased maintenance costs and additional driver’s wages and benefits, which would add up to thousands of dollars to the entire transit budget, which you’ve already said is too big anyway.

The increased wear and tear on that bus also shortens the life of the fleet as a whole, which means you have to do the uber-spendy vehicle replacement sooner, and we know you’d think that was government waste.

So you see Joe Internet Complainer, it’s not as simple as “just have the bus stop EVERY 15 minutes instead of every 30 MINUTES!!!!”, no matter how many exclamation points or caps lock you use. However, you can submit your suggestion/attend a meeting…..

In other cases, people who’ve had bad experiences believe their email, phone call or complaint was ignored, or believe it will be and so don’t bother giving feedback. I’ve personally found this to be untrue; on both Facebook Messenger and email Valley Metro has been very responsive in a reasonable amount of time. But of course, that’s not to say my experience has been the same for everyone.

All that said, of course there are challenges and room for improvement, particularly in regards to security. The fact is there’s a reason most people without a car aspire to get one. 

But using public transit instead of a car is still a viable option.

Something that helps a young man like this can’t possibly be a poor infrastructure investment, after all. 

This is the part where we all get real

At some point public transit users need to accept and understand they are in a major metropolitan city, not Pleasantville.

Sitting at a bus stop late at night will in all likelihood never be as safe as sitting in your own vehicle at a red light. Buses will break down. The socially stratified in our society, people with mental health issues or who are struggling with poverty and all its attendant challenges, also use the bus and sometimes this may lead to issues. Criminals exist and yes, they do sometimes use public transit to sell drugs. 

Other annoyances are more innocuous. Sometimes people smell bad or rudely blast their latest Netflix show on their phone without using headphones.

None of that is pleasant, and I’m not saying those issues shouldn’t be addressed. 

Riders do have a right to feel safe and demand that Valley Metro do whatever it can to create a safe environment.

But ultimately Phoenix is still a city and riders are using a public transit system; s--- will happen. That doesn’t mean you write off the entire service.

Why we think Valley Metro Phoenix is pretty darn great

When my husband and I moved from Las Vegas, Nevada to Phoenix, Arizona in 2010, it was primarily because I got into law school. However, my decision where to apply to law school was partly based on the difficulty we had with what was at the time Vegas’ horrendous public transportation system.

[Side note: This has since drastically improved: We’re home for Thanksgiving and our Uber driver must’ve thought we were nuts because we kept exclaiming over the city’s amazing, well-lighted bus stops and new buses. We even checked out the mobile app and are impressed; you can buy bus fare at the stop with a user-friendly app on your phone. Well done, Vegas!]

My husband was in a catastrophic accident in 2008 that caused him to lose his peripheral vision and the center of focus in his right eye. He now wears glasses with three prism grinds to help with the resulting permanent double vision but can no longer drive a car.

Determined to maintain his independence, the Hubby began to learn to navigate Las Vegas' public transit and disability ride share services. But back in 2009 it was a dumpster fire. The transfer layovers to switch streets directions made no sense. You either waited – I am not exaggerating – over an hour at a transfer or arrived at work two hours early (and probably still waited a minimum of half an hour; Rainbow Boulevard transfer to Flamingo Road, I’m looking at you).

Some buses ran until 2 a.m. ….but since no other adjacent routes did, you could only go straight. In a town where a large chunk of the population works graveyard and swing shifts, that’s a problem. Buses were generally filthy, with windows so scarred with graffiti you couldn’t see out of them and working air conditioning was a rarity indeed.

Yes, there was a disability ride share program, and yes, my husband used it when he could. But rides could be scheduled no more than 24 hours in advance and there was no knowing if they’d arrive 15 minutes early or 45 minutes late. Good luck scheduling and getting to doctor appointments on time with that level of variance.

In all fairness, since the accident was obviously unexpected we didn’t live in a transit-friendly area (the bus line stopped four city blocks before our apartment). 

For a while, we tried the I-devote-my-life-to-being-my-husband’s-driver route, but, as we're both fiercely independent people, we quickly realized that was a relationship-threatening dynamic and not, in any way, a long-term solution for us.

So public transit it was. When I began to look at law schools I made it a point to research the schools’ public transit ratings, too. In fact, I didn’t apply to two schools back East specifically because there was no real public transit to speak of near them.

Coming from Vegas, when we moved to Phoenix we were both amazed. Admittedly, the coming years would show us some pretty significant Dial-A-Ride challenges. Those also have since vastly improved; we like to think we contributed to that by cornering a Valley Metro rep at a meeting who, to his credit, followed up with an email and honestly listened to all we had to say. 

Still, here is what The Hubby noticed immediately upon coming to Phoenix and I’ve come to appreciate myself

1. Responsive scheduling

Every year, Valley Metro adapts the schedule in response to the public’s requests for services. That’s pretty amazing when you consider all the moving parts that have to go into tinkering with such a complex system and a good example of government doing what it should do, i.e. serve its people.

A change that has positively impacted us is the increased frequency of the Thomas Road bus to every 15 minutes on weekdays.

2. Cleanliness

Phoenix is one of the cleanest cities I have ever seen, from the pristine highways to a downtown where I rarely, if ever, see so much as an empty cup in the gutter. Yes, I know, Phoenix has dirty, grimy, pockets too; again, it’s a large city. We're focusing on the macro here and this isn’t the blog to tackle that issue. 

So, in general, the transit system is no exception. The floors of buses aren’t sticky. The seat fabric isn’t peeling and I’ve yet to see a tag scratched into a window. The air conditioning usually works. The outside of the buses aren’t covered in graffiti. I’ve read comments on social media and forums that say the Light Rail or bus is dirty but I have to wonder if that isn’t really just a case of unreasonable expectations on the rider’s part.

Every morning, the city power washes the bus and light rail stops and it shows. Yes, there may be some vandalism at the stop and sometimes by mid-day the trashes are overflowing. 

But for the most part you don’t see used condoms or mysterious piles of goo on benches. I'll concede you may want to break out the hand sanitizer as a general precaution -- do that anyway; we all play a part in public hygiene -- but you don’t feel like you’re forced to wait directly in the middle of a landfill or biohazard waste disposal facility, either.

     3.  Common sense scheduling

      Using public transit will never be to be as convenient as taking an Uber or having your own car. But overall, if you need to go from north-south to an east-west line, or transfer from the bus to the light rail, you’ll generally have a reasonable wait time. As anyone who has ever played City Skylines knows, transit routes can be on par with orbital mechanics in terms of achieving city-wide accessibility and Phoenix truly does a great job with this. If I need to get from the airport to even Mesa, I know I can, and pretty comfortably, too. 

     4. Customer service (and community)

      Before we went carless when I would fret a bit about riding the bus my husband would tell me to just ask the driver. He would also say other riders would help, too, and bus users were a community. Coming from Vegas, where making eye contact with a stranger is perceived as hostility, I was skeptical but have found his advice to be true for the most part. 

      If you can’t reach the pull cord (the T-rex appendages strike again), someone will see you trying and do it for you. Drivers answer questions or let you know what stop to get off at and when that stop is coming up. When I had a question about an upcoming stop and the driver couldn’t hear me, a couple riders ahead of me asked the driver for me.

      I’m not saying we’re all singing The Wheels on the Bus and inviting each other for Thanksgiving – for the most part everyone, myself included, basically wants to be left alone to do their thing – but it really is a community of sorts. We’re all on the bus or light rail together, after all.

      Another thing I do, and like when other people do it, is say, “Thank you, Driver!” when they get off the bus. It’s a small thing, but it can go a long way towards restoring one’s faith in humanity on a bad day. There’ll always be someone who remembers to thank the driver, and that’s reassuring in today’s world.

    5. Bike friendly

 The buses have functioning bike racks and the light rail has bike hooks, though sometimes riders stand in the accordion part that connects cars with their bikes. But getting a bike onto a bus or the light rail isn’t this huge, multi-step, cumbersome process and there isn’t this attitude from drivers that you just made their job harder or something (as I’ve seen in other cities). It’s more like, “OK, this person has a bike.” And that’s it.

    6.    Ease of boarding

     Before technology had advanced, way back in the early 2000s, getting on the bus was tedious. The bill feeder never took bills, even if they were crisp and new. The change counter would be broken. Green screens were cracked, rendering their 8-bit, black-cubed text illegible. God forbid a dollar bill had a slight crease, you were never getting on.

     Phoenix has a pretty good entry system. You do have to feed new passes into a thingy to activate them the first time but after that they generally read on the first swipe. I haven’t personally paid cash yet, but those in line in front of me who do seem to have no issues, even with bills that have apparently been both washed and run over and crumpled several times.

     It would be nice to see a QR code scanner so you can just show your phone or something, or maybe even use Samsung Pay for individual fares and rides, but still, not bad and people board fairly quickly.

Those are the main things I like about the transit system. As I already said, of course there is room for improvement and riding the bus on one side of town may not be the same as on another in terms of bus stop cleanliness or scheduling. But when dealing with a macro-level service, you have to use macro-level analysis, overall I’d say Phoenix does fairly well.