In the 1990s, few issues prompted more heated debate and emotional rhetoric in the Salt Lake Valley than light-rail.

Despite feverish attempts to stop it, TRAX was built, has only expanded — and will mark its five-year anniversary this week.

The initial north-south line debuted Dec. 4, 1999. The 15-mile Sandy-to-Salt Lake City line now has a four-mile branch to the University of Utah and University Medical Center.

That doesn't mean everyone has accepted it. And it doesn't mean the public will support a possible sales tax increase in 2006 to expand it, nor that the controversy is dead.

TRAX carried an average of 43,205 passengers each weekday in September, the most recent month UTA data are available. The north-south line has an average weekday ridership of 28,133, well above UTA's projections five years ago.

Trains, running at their maximum length of four vehicles, are packed during morning and evening rush hours. U. students and employees have used TRAX to bypass packed parking lots on campus. TRAX extensions to Midvale and West Jordan, West Valley City and Draper, among other locations, are planned.

Failure or alternative?

Still, no matter how good the numbers look, the system is a failure to Drew Chamberlain, who helped organize a boisterous protest at TRAX's groundbreaking in 1997.

"It makes me feel good to know I was right about TRAX," said Chamberlain, a South Jordan resident and chairman of the local anti-light-rail group Coalition for Accountable Government.

"It did exactly what we expected it to do, and that's nothing. UTA is real good at shifting (ridership) numbers around, but they're not getting anybody else off the road. Their actual customer base is shrinking. They have more boardings, but boardings isn't customers, boardings is just transfers.

"Even with the padded numbers, TRAX is a failure and we should never build more lines," he said. "We should close this system. It has bankrupted UTA."

UTA officials, Envision Utah, the Wasatch Front Regional Council and a recent transportation task force commissioned by the Legislature agree that UTA needs more money to expand and operate its light rail, bus and planned commuter rail system. But they have concluded the investment in transit infrastructure is worth it to provide efficient, congestion-relieving transportation alternatives in the fast-growing metropolitan area.

And while officials in the governments of Salt Lake County and various cities within it questioned or formally opposed light rail before its construction, many of those same communities are now actively seeking TRAX spurs. That attitude is shared by counterparts in the western United States. Ballot initiatives to provide financial support for transit projects were recently passed in Denver, Phoenix and Sacramento and other U.S. cities.