Transportation chaos

To fix it, shelve the South Mountain freeway and try something unique - an actual plan  

Jon Talton
Republic columnist
Apr. 16, 2006 12:00 AM  

Now let me get this straight: The cost of the proposed South Mountain Freeway has doubled in four years, to a record $2 billion. Yet the state intends to build the road anyway.

In exchange, drivers will get a freeway built on the cheap, to "shave costs." That means pushing many costs into the future, of course, as cut corners must eventually be made right. (Have you checked the mess of Loop 101 in Scottsdale lately?).

And everyone in the metro area will pay for the $2 billion freeway by seeing other projects pared back as this skyrocketing price is exacted out of a finite fund for transportation.  

Such a draconian outcome must mean this freeway is needed to serve a densely populated part of the region. In fact, this is a connector between suburban Ahwatukee and the rapidly disappearing farms of southwest Phoenix. It's deeply unpopular with many residents.

It is, however, popular with land speculators, and thus is going to be built.

Arizona leaders spent years avoiding the hippy-dippy economic strategies that have ruined the economies of leftist states such as North Carolina. Yet the way things are done in Arizona creates its own "industrial policy," ruthlessly picking winners and losers.

Arizona uses cheap land, few restrictions and public funding for infrastructure to make the growth machine rich. Cities and towns play along, greedy for sales taxes and development fees.

Aside from some private fortunes, the consequences have often been unfortunate. Everywhere there's a disconnect between development and everything else, including transportation. Coherent planning is a joke.

Thus, Pinal County spreads out with tract houses while commuters wait on farm roads. Interstate 17 north of Phoenix remains a rural highway from the 1960s. The gridlock on Interstate 10 in the West Valley extends beyond rush hours.

And, apparently, the South Mountain Freeway will be built even if it eats everybody else's road projects.

The most amazing thing about the mess is the utter lack of creativity.

Here we are, in the 21st century, armed with sobering facts about the direction of energy prices and temperatures, and Phoenix's peculiar vulnerability to them. And we're basing our plans on thinking and arrangements from the late 1950s.

That was when the first map of Phoenix's freeway system was proposed, and in the 1980s and 1990s that map was pretty much built.

A boomlet to stop it failed, because 20th-century America could imagine no future without the car and sprawl.

My neighborhood lost thousands of historic houses. The alignment apparently couldn't be changed by two blocks, and the powers that lived in Arcadia and Paradise Valley didn't care.

Those freeways opened up a suburban land rush that continues to destabilize older areas. With no meaningful zoning or preservation of farmland, we lost most of the citrus groves and agricultural fields that helped cool the city.

And for all this, we get worse congestion every day. This was known even in 1959. The freeways started in the 1930s by Robert Moses in New York City, often rammed through longstanding neighborhoods with catastrophic results, actually generated more traffic.

You would think these experiences would lead to a chastened and careful reassessment, even without the added incentives of global warming and a new energy reality.

It's not that freeways are always inappropriate. It's just that they can't solve our total needs for the future. And they sure can't do this when transportation is totally divorced from what actually happens in development.

What should be done?

• Kill the South Mountain Freeway.
• Connect Ahwatukee to the central city with either light rail or commuter rail.
• Link West Valley cities to the rest of the region with commuter rail.
• Re-establish train service between Phoenix and Tucson in preparation for a bullet-train project.
• Upgrade bus service on the busiest or most promising routes.
• Put a moratorium on all new sprawl residential development until comprehensive plans can be drawn up to provide transportation and pay for it.
• Require all transportation projects to have multimodal components. For example, light rail running along a freeway route.

• Establish a consortium for 21st-century transportation research and implementation that would make Arizona a leader in new technologies and approaches.

The develo-Luddites will scream that this would kill the economy. No, it would create a boom of new opportunities and much better quality of life for people who actually live here.

By focusing growth on existing areas, the plan will have the added benefit of helping to manage our water reserves.

A crazy plan that will never happen, you say? It may never happen. But the real insanity is the status quo: doing the same thing, hoping for a different result.

Reach Talton at jon.talton@arizonarepublic.com. Read Talton's blog at www.taltonblog.azcentral.com.