Riding the bus in 1945 Phoenix, Arizona


As a kid in Minneapolis, I learned how to get around town by riding the bus. It stopped, literally, right in front of our house on Bloomington Avenue, and for a quarter you could go anywhere in the Greater Minneapolis metropolitan area. I learned how to ask for transfers, and the buses ran so often that there was never any need for a schedule, there was one literally every twenty minutes.

When I moved to Phoenix as a teenager I found that this wasn't true. I tried riding city buses a few times, but it was miserable. The only place I found with worse bus service was Los Angeles in the 1980s. But times have changed, and I was on a Phoenix Metro bus just yesterday. And it was modern, bright and clean, and it ran on time, which I was able to check precisely with the Smart Phone app. And it made me wonder about how Phoenix used to be. Let's go back to 1945.


We're at the corner of 1st Avenue and Washington, and will be taking the bus to Encanto Park. And what a bus! The old trolley cars were really worn out, noisy, and uncomfortable. This is nice!




And how about this one, Sun Valley Bus Lines! Radio equipped! Thank you for riding the bus with me in 1945!

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Comments

  1. Maryvale ManSeptember 9, 2019 at 7:30 PM

    Sun Valley Bus Lines was a private venture and not the City Bus Line. They came from out of the city to bring people Downtown and to take them past where the City Bus Line ran.

    ReplyDelete

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