Arizona State Route 202 - Future: South Mountain Freeway

Future: South Mountain Freeway

The third, yet unbuilt and most controversial segment of the Loop 202 partial beltway is the South Mountain Freeway. Construction has been continuously delayed due to ongoing tension between regional transportation planners, who insist that the freeway is necessary to ensure smooth traffic flow in the coming decades; residents of the adjacent Ahwatukee community, who could lose 120 homes to eminent domain depending on the road's final alignment; and leaders and residents of the adjoining Gila River Indian Community (GRIC), who have oscillated between opposing and supporting the freeway in recent years.

The South Mountain Freeway has two distinct segments: the "eastern segment" that straddles the Ahwatukee-GRIC border, and the "western segment" that will parallel 59th Avenue through the southwest Phoenix community of Laveen. Together, these segments would form a 21.9-mile bypass around Downtown Phoenix, linking the metropolitan area's southwestern and southeastern suburbs. The freeway as currently envisioned would begin at the existing four-level symmetrical stack interchange between I-10 and the Santan Freeway on the Chandler-Ahwatukee border and terminate at I-10 and 59th Avenue west of Downtown Phoenix.

The specific alignment of the freeway has been revised repeatedly since 1985, when Maricopa County voters originally approved its construction as part of the regional highway network envisioned under Proposition 300. In 1988, the Maricopa Association of Governments (MAG), the region's transportation planning agency, suggested an alignment of the freeway's western segment along 55th Avenue and an alignment of the eastern segment along Pecos Road. A federal study in 2001 required ADOT to reexamine those suggestions, and the task of recommending the final alignment fell to a Citizen's Advisory Team formed in 2002. In April of 2006, that panel released their final recommendations to route the western portion of the freeway four miles further west to connect with Loop 101, and to reject the proposed alignment of the eastern portion along Pecos Road, suggesting that the latter be built on GRIC land instead. Two months later, ADOT overruled the panel's suggestion for the western segment and opted for the current 59th Avenue alignment instead.

In February of 2012, a non-binding referendum was held in the Gila River Indian Community on whether the eastern portion of the freeway should be built on Community land several miles south of Pecos Road. Options in the referendum were to build on Community land, off Community land, or not at all. The "no build" option won a plurality of votes, receiving 720 votes out of a total 1,481 cast. MAG sent out a press release soon after making it clear that construction of the freeway would move forward as planned along the Pecos Road alignment. Expecting this outcome, MAG and ADOT had previously (in 2010) shrunk the freeway's footprint from 10 lanes to eight in order to minimize its impact on Ahwatukee. Fearing the worst possible outcome of the freeway being built without exits onto Community land (as would be the case with the Pecos Road alignment), plans quickly arose for a new GRIC referendum that would exclude the "no build" option, leaving only "yes on Gila River or no on Gila River." As of early October 2012, the group organizing the new referendum had collected and submitted 1,517 signatures to the tribal government. In the meantime, the $1.9-billion freeway is scheduled to start construction between 2014 and 2015.