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The long term plan is to reduce the amount of traffic going through downtown and that is why they are connecting Aviation to 6th street. Once that connection is completed, the amount of through traffic on the street car route will be reduced and Street Car right away can be considered.  I agree however that future Street Car expansion should consider intersection right away.

I’ve been hearing promises since the 80’s that Aviation would connect to either 6th street, or I-10 like it really should. There was footdragging and footdragging and footdragging, then that idea was finally killed because a handful of whiny idiots thought that warehouses had historical value. Historical value in warehouses. What great event happened there? People stored stuff. Yeah, real historic. (rolls eyes)

I may have said this before, but after the honeymoon period, the only people riding the streetcar will be the people who were taking the bus. This is appropriate because all the streetcar is is a bus on tracks, anyway. People wanting to visit downtown will end up driving their car downtown to ride the streetcar, anyway. So, ultimately, this streetcar will end up removing a grand total of zero cars from the road.

I want to address your 4th, 5th, and 6th paragraph. Although your concerns are valid, your insistence on referring to it as a “Choo Choo Train” and your overall pessimistic attitude towards the process and Tucson in general really gets to the heart of your argument. You believe that Tucson is already lost and we should give up. It doesn’t really matter what solution would have been developed, you would have found a way to tie it back to the Rio Nuevo and there for dismiss it. Government mismanagement is hardly a uniquely Tucson activity but it is something we need to combat.  However, I would not include the Street Car in that category.

The streetcar, the Rio Nuevo theft and subsequent lack of consequences, Tucson Electric Park, all symptoms of the same problem: incompetent and/or corrupt leadership. Pessimistic? You bet I am. I have repeatedly said that Tucson has the potential to be one of America’s greatest cities, but the first obstacle we need to overcome to get there is we need better leaders. We’re never going to get that until we make the electorate understand that elections have consequences. What’s the definition of insanity? Voting in the same people over and over again and expecting them to do something different. As long as voters are basing their votes on skin color, or leaving an incompetent in an office because they hate a paradigm of what Republicans are, we’re never going to move forward here. So, yes, as long as the current leadership stays in place this town is a lost cause. You want to combat corruption and incompetence in government? You do it at the polling place. This town just doesn’t seem to get that.

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