Yes, judging by their 2% transit mode share, I'm guessing Phoenix's transit is pretty average for the sunbelt, which is to say absolutely awful, and near-useles

Yes, judging by their 2% transit mode share, I'm guessing Phoenix's transit is pretty average for the sunbelt, which is to say absolutely awful, and near-useless for most trips. Another example of "don't just look at what's on paper": Dallas has more light rail laid down than any city in the country, at 93 miles. Which gives it a massive transit mode share of...2%. Wow. Think about how badly everything must be designed to have so much light rail that hardly anyone actually uses. For Dallas' case, you can go to Google Maps, turn on satellite mode, and inspect some train stations, and it's pretty obvious what the problem is. The land use is horribly unconducive to walking + transit. E.g. go out a bit from the city center and you'll find stations with exclusively single-family home neighborhoods right beside, meaning almost no one can walk to/from that station to get around. Such a waste. It's not like the government has to really build anything itself to fix that issue: only a change of rules is necessary to allow denser development in the area adjacent to the station. But America's culture around zoning is so fucked up that this is usually impossible, even after a city has invested hundreds of millions of dollars into infrastructure, we still insist on crippling it.