Massive efforts being made for Tempe streets

Tempe just started a massive effort to improve the quality and safety of their streets. The effort includes measures such as restoring the pavement of every street to excellent in the next four years, adding photo enforcement, special police enforcement details and exploring environmental changes. The updates will look to improve the safety of intersections, whether it’s trimming a tree or changing where the crosswalk is located.

Eric Iwersen, Transportation Manager for the City of Tempe, joined “Arizona Horizon” to discuss how these changes are looking to benefit Tempe’s roadways, along with how these improvements will affect local Arizonans.

“It’s really about 90, 92% of our streets in Tempe; we have 1,200 miles of roadway in our city, so about 90% of those are going to be resurfaced in some way, repaved in some ways. Sometimes just a simple top coat to the street, to apply it, to really bring it up to a really good, usable condition for all of our users,” Iwersen said.

In 2024, voters passed an initiative fund to fund the project and to accelerate the improvements coming into that roadway system.

So how does the City of Tempe know which street to work on next?

Iwersen explained, “Every street has a score, what we call a pavement quality index (PQI). And so with those, we take really the worst streets, the worst rating, so on a scale of like 0 to 100, and we’re trying to get all of the streets up to above an 82 score in that PQI.”

The goal to complete this project is four years, around the year 2028.