Finally Cheaper Than Phoenix

Phoenix and Philadelphia are like ships passing in the night. One is
about to replace the other as the fifth-most populous city in the US.
I'll give you a hint: it's not Philadelphia. Phoenix's explosive
growth is the envy of many an old and achy Northeastern city.

One thing that helps Phoenix is that it's a relatively new city. It's
been around for a fairly long time, but only as a small and sleepy
town. Then, air conditioning was perfected around the 1950's, and
Phoenix started growing.

And growing and growing and growing. Arizona State University,
located in nearby Tempe, is opening a Phoenix campus. Why not -- the
university adds the equivalent of the entire enrollment of Villanova
every year. Suburbs of Phoenix are now bigger in population as such
major-league cities as Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis. The
growth in the present and future boggles the mind sometimes.

Back to old and new. Phoenix doesn't have to spend as much on
rebuilding crumbling infrastructure (roads, water and sewer lines, and
the like) as older cities like Philadelphia. More money to spend on
other things that serve its citizens and draw new citizens.
Meanwhile, Philly can't even keep up with plugging potholes and
repairing broken water mains.

But I've finally found one area in which Phoenix's infrastructure is
more expensive than Philadelphia's. It seems that while we might lust
after Phoenix's features, Phoenicians envy the walkability of our
downtown.

Philadelphia is nice and compact, after all; an annoyance if you don't
like tight streets and high density, but a convenience if you like
walking from Point A to Point B. And in fact, there's a lot of
walking going on in downtown Philadelphia: walking to work from home,
walking from bar to bar, walking through urban parks and shopping
districts.

In downtown Philadelphia, you're never too far away from something
that you can't reasonably walk to it. In downtown Phoenix, on the
other hand, if you're two blocks away, you might as well hop in a car.
Because those two blocks are so big that they'll take you fifteen
minutes walking fast. (And let's not even get started on the
pleasantness of walking in 110 degree dry heat.)

So Phoenix is installing light rail cars to shuttle people into and
around its downtown. They have plenty of space to drop the lines into
existing roads; when your main boulevard is four wide lanes wide,
there's no need to tunnel below grade or build an elevated train, is
there? But it's still expensive. Time will tell whether this will be
successful in terms of people using it to become more mobile apart
from cars, but even if it is successful, it's still expensive. Much
more expensive than what the city of Philadelphia has to do to get
people in and around its downtown. Score one (finally) for Philly.