60 hours Arizonans lose a week and a half
of unpaid work staring at brake lights. Maricopa county, Arizona Second in size Fourth in population And a 250 mile freeway system that keeps
four-and-a-half million people moving. (Radio:) "Commute, not over yet!" As bad as Phoenix traffic is, it
could have been so much worse! Arizona was decades late
building up their freeway network and most of these roads
almost didn't happen at all. (Beach:) I was part of that second boom that came through
and to us... where's those freeways? (Anderson:) To complete of the
Loop 101 would take about 60 years. (Beach:) We got a late start. If we're
gonna be a big city, we gotta act like one. (Anderson:) We have to do something. Hello from Phoenix, Arizona —
and America's newest urban freeway The Loop 202 "South Mountain Freeway." I was planning to do a video just on the 202, a new freeway which lets through traffic have
an option to bypass downtown Phoenix entirely But then I discovered Phoenix's really
interesting history of urban freeways. Not that long ago, like back when
"E.T." would have been in theaters, Phoenix hated freeways. Yet somehow, almost overnight,
Phoenix went from hating them to embracing them And not just begrudgingly, like they went all in and
in 30 short years built one of the biggest and best regional
freeway networks in the country. Most cities stopped building
their freeways by the 1980s, but that's when Phoenix was just getting started. How did they do that?
Why did they do that? And was it a good thing? (Beach:) I think what they did was miraculous "Detour" Dan Beach knows valley freeways because he's been flying
over them since the 1980s! (Commercial:) "Check in, Arizona!
Detour Dan flies valley wide..." (Beach:) First couple years, I wasn't in radio
and I was one of those commuters and it was horrible! Not that long ago, the two and
a half million people living in Phoenix had just two and a half freeways to use. Similarly sized cities had long
finished huge regional networks. Phoenix was running late. (Beach:) It's tough anywhere you go when
it's over 100 degrees every day in the summer but when you get in the into a vehicle
and you get on the freeway and it only goes for about four miles and it's bumper to
bumper the whole four miles that you're on it. The story starts in 1956. (Documentary:) "...providing the
staggering sum of 51 billion dollars...") President Eisenhower signed
the Federal Aid Highway Act. For every $10 a state spent
building a new interstate highway, the federal government matched it with $90. Interstates primarily connect
regions and states together but they also can be used to link parts
of cities together through the suburbs. And here's where Arizona's
story is a little bit different. (Anderson:) The Arizona Highway Department
was dominated by rural interests. So where did the department decide to
start building freeways? In rural Arizona. Eric Anderson has been involved with Phoenix
transportation planning since the 1980s. (Anderson:) The first section of
freeway in Phoenix actually was I-17, around what we call the Durango Curve. That
section of freeway was actually built in the late 1950s. In fact, that was one of the first
sections of interstate built in the United States. But then the funding went elsewhere. So
there wasn't much happening in the Phoenix area. Arizona first built rural sections of interstate like this portion of I-10
here in Tonopah, Arizona. And then gradually worked
their way in to the big city. Which is sort of reverse of
what other states were doing — building downtown freeways first
and then working their way out. (Anderson:) So I-10 outside of
Maricopa county as well as I-8 Excellent for zooming across the
countryside but once you got to Phoenix the highways unceremoniously
dumped you onto local streets. That created a gap in the eight-state coast-to-coast Interstate 10 —
right through downtown. It's not that state engineers hadn't been
planning to bring I-10 through Phoenix. They'd been drawing up plans since the 1960s. There's an urban legend that the
publisher of Phoenix's biggest daily newspaper got an advanced
photo rendering of the I-10 skyway. This long continuous bridge deck. It looked like something out of The Jetsons— over a big city park. And then as
the streets crossed underneath, these big round helicoil interchanges
would suck the traffic into big circles and it would lift
you onto the freeway deck. The publisher, as he's looking at it, his wife came in the room and she glanced
down and she said, "Ew! That's kind of ugly!" And as the legend goes, that one offhand
comment set back Phoenix freeways by 15 years. Engineers in Arizona, just like their peers
in other states, had big freeway dreams. And as they waited year after year
for money to finally shift back toward the city, the public began to sour. (Anderson:) The 1970s was when
a lot of environmental concerns about highway construction were
kind of coming to the forefront. There was a lot of concern about freeways
dividing neighborhoods and all the rest. At the time, Phoenix only had the one freeway This 1950s construction I-17. It was built on fill. It was like a
mountain that cut neighborhoods in half. So when you say, let's build some more freeways— Well, we don't want more of that! (Anderson:) There was a vote of the people,
kind of an advisory vote. The Arizona Republic, the newspaper
record, came out against freeways. The editor leaned into the
fear of native Arizonans. Freeways would make Phoenix
into another Los Angeles! He showcased freeway revolts and
unapologetically took to the front page opposing the wild Jetsons-like I-10 skyway plan. More letters from opponents Then entire pages journaling
freeway problems in other cities. And then finally off to the polls to vote. (Anderson:) And the people
said, no we don't want it. And that really kind of cooled
the freeway program at the time. (Beach:) I think the temperament,
it was a conservative small desert. (Commercial:) "Hi folks, I'm Tex Earnhardt, the Ford dealer right here in Tempe and
I guarantee you this ain't no bull..." (Beach:) So yeah, I think
there was some reluctance for the the growth. But I was part of that
second boom that came through. And to us, where's those freeways, man? If we're gonna
be a big city, we gotta we gotta act like one! (News report:) "Last year there were 92,921
accidents. That's more than 250 every day..." (Anderson:) It was pretty
gruesome having lived here then. The arterial streets just had
tremendous amount of congestion on there. (News report:) "The number one
accident in Phoenix? Rear enders. That's because we're all driving on
city streets instead of highways..." More than 600,000 people
flooded into Maricopa county in the decade after the failed 1973 freeway vote. (Anderson:) The surface street system—
which we have a very well-defined very good arterial street system, it carried
basically all the traffic in the metro area. (Beach:) What I love about Phoenix is—
it's built on a grid that 9 out of 10 of us can find our way
around. It's east-west north-south. But an exploding population without
freeways really gave the grid a workout. These roads are wide three lanes wide. They
kind of feel like little freeways in themselves except they have driveways. That makes it kind
of dangerous to be using it like a freeway. Multiply lots of drivers by lots of distance
and you get a real mathematical mess. When engineers determine delay,
they add links and nodes together. Time to travel between the intersections and the typical wait time an average
driver might expect at each signal. Things all fall apart when we dump a
freeway-sized load of traffic into the network. More cars mean longer green lights. Which means longer red
lights for the other street. And everything just falls apart. (Anderson:) live in Scottsdale, you
know. If i have to go to Glendale, which is in the west valley, you know
it might take me 45 minutes to an hour. These new residents brought traffic
and new opinions on how to fix it. (Beach:) I had come from south of
Chicago and I had seen the Chicago freeways and grew up with
those. And that was commuting. Old-time Arizonans believed
that by stopping freeways they had stopped Phoenix from
becoming another Los Angeles. But they were happy to embrace L.A.-style zoning
rules. Which meant every new house that got built gradually turned Phoenix into another Los Angeles—
just one without any freeways. (Anderson:) In the early 1980s, the local elected
officials here said, we have to do something. Build a huge loop to the north
another one to the east and south a freeway in the middle
and eventually one out west. (Anderson:) Put together some scenarios, and it
basically showed that to complete the Loop 101 would take about 60 years, if we
didn't have any additional funding. That clearly wasn't going to be acceptable. Back in the 1950s and 60s
cities were using federal Interstate Act match money
to build their urban freeways and they were pretty much done by the 1980s. So when Phoenix was ready to build its urban
freeways, the federal program had kind of moved on They were focused more on maintaining
the system that had already been built. Phoenix had lost its window and it was going to have to
make the journey all on its own. (Anderson:) MAG and our elected leadership
actually put a question on the ballot in October of 1985, to impose a half-cent sales
tax on the citizens here in Maricopa county to fund new freeway construction. (News promo:) "There's a migration of people
to our state and they're not snowbirds. They're coming here to roost for
good. Where are they coming from?" The second wave residents changed the atmosphere. Conventional suburban freeways
also seemed much more practical less scary than the big Jetsons I-10 skyway. Eugene C. Pulliam had passed away. And his son wasn't nearly so antagonistic. (Anderson:) It passed with
an overwhelming majority (Traffic reporter:) "If you're on your way home, look out for accidents on the
i-17 northbound at Northern. "Sandy Sullivan, KZZP 'SkyView' Traffic." (Jingle:) "104.7 FM!" (Commercial:) "Come to our
10 beautiful model homes..." "..the backyard bonus is back..." "...if you've been waiting to buy a new home..." "...golf resort. Take I-10 west to exit..." New neighborhoods going up at record pace as Americans fled for the
sunny skies of the southwest. Each person paying half-a-penny
sales tax on each dollar they spent to build freeways. (Anderson:) That was probably one of
the first dedicated regional taxes for transportation in the country. So that really
launched our regional freeway program here. It kicked off with Loop 101 in 1987. Fresh sales tax revenue accelerated
construction by 58 years The 101 also fixed drainage problems in the
area and it gave Phoenix legal justification to stop issuing building permits on any
property that was in the freeway's path. But the magnum opus was money—
and a plan to finally complete Interstate
10 through downtown Phoenix. Lots of planning.
Lots of public involvement. Instead of cars flying high on skyways,
drivers would burrow beneath a city park. A series of bridges which built a deck atop the tunnel —
now called the Deck Park Tunnel Complete with eight 750 horsepower fans to
suck out the exhaust and draw in fresh air and 3,500 light bulbs. It opened to traffic in 1990 and completed Interstate 10 coast to coast. That's about when Phoenix's
unstoppable freeway building campaign hit a wall. (Radio:) "The station that JAMS!..." "Forty minutes of today's hottest music!" "The valley's Power 92!" (Anderson:) ADOT had not built urban freeways. And so when you build an urban freeway in an urban
environment, you have a lot of other challenges. Weird problems the state had never
dealt with out in the countryside. Like Arrowhead Ranch. A new
master-planned community in Glendale that promised to give the state
free land for the 101 freeway— if only ADOT would swing the
freeway up in their direction. But when Arizona went to the
developer to get the land, they said, no we never
promised to give you any land. Well, who was right? A state auditor decided to dig
through the records and find out. And he couldn't find any written records. So the state ended up buying the land. A double win for Arrowhead Ranch, I suppose. (Anderson:) Right of way, of course, is always more expensive than anybody
think it thinks it's going to be. Like the 28 million dollars Arizona had
planned to build the nine-mile Pima Freeway. (Anderson:) This was actually going to
be a parkway with stop lights. As the analysis was done, say, that's not going
to work. We need to do a full freeway. Which wound up costing about 10 times that. The freeway was supposed to run along the border of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa
Indian Community and Scottsdale. And in an attempt at fairness,
ADOT and the tribes agreed to split the route 50/50 between the Native
American community land and the city. And after buying 17-million
dollars worth of houses, a group of Scottsdale residents fought back. And i can understand. Hundreds of homes to demolish when there
are empty fields right across the street. But these aren't ordinary fields. Pimas have lived on this land for... ...ever. Descendants of Hohokums who built
irrigation canals all across the valley, a thousand years ago! In the 1870s, European American settlers nearly drove the Pima off this ancestral land
and and onto a reservation farther south. Pima leaders traveled to Washington, D.C. and
explained all of this to Rutherford B. Hayes. And President Hayes signed an
order preserving their land. So to the tribe's credit, when they were faced with the prospect
of a freeway cutting across these lands, they actually agreed! But they negotiated well. $250-million dollars and direct development rights at
all eight of the new freeway exits. That turned out to be a really
good deal for them over time. And showed the state of Arizona just
how complicated urban freeways can be. (Anderson:) The initial plans were pretty
rudimentary. The freeway-to-freeway interchanges? The initial plan didn't have that.
And so the freeways didn't connect. I don't know what the thought was. I wasn't involved in
it at the time. But those freeway-to-freeway interchanges are really important
but they're very expensive, too! That all meant buying about fifty percent
more land than they had anticipated. Up from 8,000 acres to 11,000 acres. More complication
more cost and, oh yeah, this: (Anderson:) Revenues were
coming in significantly under projections. And so you had this kind
of nightmare which culminated in 1990. Much higher costs
much lower revenues And the 58 miles which Arizona had promised
to have finished by 1990 was only... 14 miles (Anderson:) The legislature got involved
and called for performance audit for the entire program. I was
actually hired by MAG in 1992 to come in and try to provide some financial
integrity back to the to the freeway program. Working with ADOT we develop what's called
a life cycle program. What the life cycle is the length of the tax, right? So when
the tax ends, you can't keep building, right? Because you're out of money. Nobody was
watching that. So as costs were going up, projects were being pushed further in the future until
they were basically being pushed off the table because the funding source was going away. So we
brought all that back in from that point forward the freeway program really took off and I think
it's been on a very solid footing since then. An advantage of building
the freeways later is that, they're all new now that they need them. If they built them back in the
1960s, they'd be all worn out. And modern freeway design tends to fix a lot of the mistakes that engineers
made back in the 1950s and 60s. Those old freeways had too many exits.
They were spaced too closely together. Newer freeways they tend to have
exits about a mile-and-a-half apart. It makes the freeway flow better. I like how this 51 freeway goes
down underneath the cross streets. Pulling the freeway below grade is probably really
expensive to do, but it makes the community nice because when you're looking off in the horizon you
don't have this big wall in the middle of town. You can your eyes can look right over the freeway. (Anderson:) The initial 1985
tax expired at the end of 2005. Proposition 400 didn't face much opposition
at all. Local news, which had been antagonistic in
the 1970s, was now downright promotional. (Anderson:) 56% of that funding
goes into the highway program a third goes into public transportation
and the balance goes into arterial streets. Which most people liked. But I do say "most people." (Commercial:) "This is outrageous!" "One guy from Gilbert is spending over a million
dollars telling you that all of us got it wrong." "Support from nearly every elected official
in the county— Republican and Democrat." "Vote YES on proposition 400." One millionaire guy who wanted to
"stop light rail in its tracks" and concentrate strictly on freeways. But it didn't matter, Prop 400
passed to the ballot box easily. And the "South Mountain" Loop 202 freeway, which
I was showing you at the beginning of the video? Prop 400 funds paid for that! This wouldn't be a Road Guy Rob
video if i didn't admit my own bias. I'm obviously very much pro-freeway. (Radio:) "Eastbound on the tunnel,
that wreck is finally clear..." There's a good possibility that
you too had a suburban childhood. Your family driving you on
freeways to birthday parties, family outings to the zoo, going to CompUSA to buy that new computer game... Freeways are what we know. It's what we want more of. But like the American diet, are freeways
and suburbs actually good for us? That's a difficult question
for somebody like me to ask. But i posed it to Dr. Kristina Currans. She's an urban planning faculty
member at the University of Arizona. She points out three major problems
with the Phoenix valley freeway system. Except for weirdos like me, most
people drive just to get someplace. Home to work work to store and then back home. The more spread out places are,
the more miles we have to drive to get to places. Now, that only works if we
can travel quickly travel. At regular speed, far places fall out of reach. That's why historically. as population grows, housing, jobs and stores all kind
of pile up on top of one another. Travel slows down a little bit but
you can still access what you need to. And it uses a lot less land. Dr. Currans believes Phoenix was getting bigger,
but the new freeways helped make the city spread out even farther than it naturally
would have without the freeways. Faster roads increase market area Stores, offices, and other amenities which
are within practical reach of your house. The trade-off is that these amenities can
stay spread out over a vast amount of land. We build buildings which require
use of freeways to get to them. And then we're locked into that
kind of transportation system. Which fills up with cars and
then we're back to traffic jams (Beach:) No matter how many freeways you build,
no matter how wide you build them, I've been here long enough to know
you better be ready for round three. (News report:) "And what about the streets?
When it gets to be 121-122 degrees? What happens to the asphalt?" The sun and the desert have an understanding. It can heat up the valley floor all day long but at night, plants breathe
and the desert cools off. Cities throw off this sort of groove. Development means removing
these cooling desert plants. We replace it with concrete asphalt and buildings. And these act like big heat
batteries. Storing energy from the sun all day long and releasing heat after dark When cities struggle to cool off at night,
it means an even hotter day tomorrow. Extreme heat can be fatal
to vulnerable populations and tends to impact poorer populations
more than it does many of the rest of us which makes the problem easy for us to ignore. If freeways have allowed Phoenix to increase
its surface area and consume more and more of the desert then they have also contributed to the
growing urban heat island effect in the valley. Tucson, Arizona is about 90
minutes south of Phoenix. And it's the control group of the experiment. Like Phoenix of old, Tucson only has two freeways. But unlike Phoenix, Tucson
purposely never built any more. The city is about one-quarter the size of Phoenix
and traffic in town is objectively terrible. That can't be right. Eight
minutes to go 2.4 miles? How's traffic in Tucson? (college kid noises) Let's suppose Tucson followed Phoenix's example.
They built their own regional freeway network. Dr. Currans poses a good question: Whose neighborhood should the city
or region put the freeway in Tucson? She points out how traditionally,
lower-income households living on cheap land and ethnic minorities with less political
clout tend to be the ones impacted more. That certainly was the case with
the Pima community along the 101. In a familiar story, the "South
Mountain" 202 freeway project also borders open fields on tribal land. But this time, ADOT chose to go the opposite way. (swooshy news music) (News promo:) "The wrecking ball is
about to swing! Clearing the way for a valley freeway. Houses are going
to be toppling down near Ahwatukee." (News:) "I've been living here for
past 30 years. They're gonna ruin it." Even when impacts are fair and equitable,
impacts are still impacts. (News story:) "A yes vote would end a light rail expansion, while a no vote would allow light rail
to expand throughout the entire city." Proposition 105 in 2019,
proposed banning any expansion of metro light rail anywhere in the valley. Voters went to the polls and Prop 105 lost handily. In the 1970s, the Phoenix
city street grid worked fine. But it took a new generation to see that
streets alone were no longer enough.
Their vote in 1985 catapulted
Phoenix into its next phase. Today, the valley freeway systems work. But maybe a new generation sees that
freeways alone may soon not be enough. The defeat of Prop 105 may be one of the first of
many which pushes the city into its next phase. Tweet me @roadguyrob
