Monday, October 29, 2007

More Light Rail Stuff

This past Saturday, I attended another "public" meeting in Tempe with City officials, APAC members and members of the Community Design & Architecture group that is working with the City of Tempe by doing light rail impact studies along Apache Blvd.
The public interest hasn't quite peaked. You see, there were at least a dozen people there to handle the questions of maybe 6-8 citizens. The main discussions centered around making the light rail line easy for people to live, work and play near by. A lot of effort seems to be in place to get input from people as to the types of development needed along Apache. If you ask me, there are some less than desirable areas that need a ton of help as well as some really great areas that will be even more enhanced by the coming of this project.
Access from near by neighborhoods will need to be improved to make it convenient for people to walk to a station. Some of their studies focused on areas within an 800' walking distance to each "platform" (rail stop.)
Some things of interest to me were looking at many of the very small parcels along Apache which do not seem exactly perfect for developing large, quality projects. We saw slides and projections of "potential" ways to develop the area but it is still pretty early to see how the development community is going to react. From what I have heard from some of my friends in the commercial real estate business, the light rail line has a lot of interest.
This is going to be fun for us to watch.. Stay tuned. :-)

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