Phoenix’s rapid growth is affecting city services

More than 500 people moved to the Phoenix metro area every day last year from outside Arizona, and rapid growth over the past decade shows no sign of slowing down. This causes a big challenge when planning for the increasing demands of the transportation system. Host Susan Lisovicz spoke with Eric Anderson, the Executive Director of the Maricopa County of Governments, about how phoenix is dealing with this.

In describing what the city is doing right now Anderson said, “We’re developing a new investment plan to ask the voters if they’d be willing to extend our sales tax for transportation here in the valley. So in doing that we have to look out into the future, we’re looking out to the year 2050 and you can imagine the challenges we’re have looking forward 30 years in the future trying to anticipate not only what the valley’s going to look like not only in terms of population and employment but also how will people travel in the future?”

Anderson continued to explain, “Maricopa County continues to be one of the fastest-growing counties in the country. We have to continue to expand both our roadway capacity as well as our public transportation system here. Looking forward in the future we do have one new freeway planned out in the Southwest of the valley that hopefully will relieve some of the congestion on Interstate 10.”

When asked about specifics of future increases to mass transit Anderson answered,” The east valley has little or no bus service at all and so we have to have some basic bus service in some of these areas of the valley that don’t have it now. The northwest part of the valley has some scarcity of bus service too. Meanwhile, the rail program continues to expand so the Southwest extension is under construction today from Downtown Phoenix.