Business

Interstate 11: A Road to Nowhere

Saguaro National Park West, looking into Avra Valley

Break out a map of the United States. Start at the Canadian border, at the Michigan town of Port Huron. Trace your finger through Flint and Lansing and down to Indianapolis. Arc southwestward through Paducah, Kentucky, to Memphis, then cross the Big Muddy near Greenville, Mississippi, and barrel down to Texarkana, Houston, and on to the Mexican border at Laredo and Brownsville.

You have just described what has been slugged Interstate 69, the so-called NAFTA Highway. It was approved way back when that trade agreement was first signed, with plans costing upwards of $2.5 billion. So far only segments have been built, since the federal government has been slack on infrastructure since the days of the Great Recession, and the current administration hates the very notion of trade agreements in the first place. About the only place where much activity is taking place is Texas, where, for the past decade, sections of the highway have been laid out and others constructed using funds from tolls, public-private partnerships, and fees imposed on commercial vehicles.

Now focus on Arizona. Draw a line from Nogales to just north of Green Valley. Jog to the west through the Avra Valley behind the Tucson Mountains. Follow a line roughly parallel to the existing Interstate 10 up to Casa Grande, then jog west again through the Maricopa Mountains to Buckeye. Go west more, across the wetlands of the Gila and Hassayampa Rivers, and follow Aguila Road and the Vulture Mine Road up to Wickenburg.

You have just described the southern reach of what has been designated Interstate 11, following US transportation conventions that number north-south highways sequentially from west to east and east-west highways from south to north. Like I–69, its ghostly counterpart, I–11 is meant to hasten the flow of goods from Mexico north to Canada and vice versa, connecting to roads leading to lucrative markets in Salt Lake City, Denver, the Bay Area, Seattle, and so forth.

Like I–69, portions of I–11 already exist in the form of a US 93 that runs north from Wickenburg to Kingman and thence to Las Vegas over the recently built Mike O’Callaghan–Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge at Boulder Dam. Beyond Las Vegas 93 has been improved only here and there, but planners at the Arizona Department of Transportation are itching to get going, Texas-style, without waiting for the rest of the Mountain West to catch up.

Now, highways are like water: as the old saying goes, water flows uphill toward money, and roads flow either to where money exists or where it can be made—one reason why, when Loop 202 was slated to be extended around the South Mountains of Phoenix, there was a quiet scramble to buy up the land where the road would be built. If you care to go up and have a look at that massive construction project, which is supposed to be finished by the end of this year, you’ll see another fact about highways: Though the roads themselves are comparatively narrow, they require huge tracts of land on either side of them to be bladed, cleared of vegetation, and leveled.

ADOT’s preferred route, across great stretches of undeveloped land, would visit destruction on scores of thousands of acres of prime Sonoran Desert land. Much of the Tucson stretch lies adjacent to Saguaro National Park and Tucson Mountain Parks. Although the plan overlooks the fact, I–11 would also isolate Ironwood Forest National Monument, which at least some members of the Trump Department of Interior have made efforts to decommission, the better to privatize it and make some of that longed-for money.

Says Kevin Dahl of the National Parks Conservation Association and a longtime environmental activist, “Improving I–19 and I–10 through Tucson would be so much more beneficial to our community’s transportation needs than a new freeway in a location and direction that almost no one in Pima County needs to travel. Add the facts that the new freeway has huge impacts and a huge cost, and we really do have to ask why this alternative has not been fully explored and reviewed. We and others who have been involved in scoping and stakeholder process have wondered why the emphasis on developing the problematic Avra Valley route.”

ADOT counters that it is offering alternatives, but it also makes plain that the route I asked you to trace from Nogales to Wickenburg is its preferred one, its first choice, the course it wants Arizonans to embrace, writing the collateral damage off as a cost of the progress that feeds The Machine. Some of its arguments seem to be stretches: for one thing, ADOT says, I–11 will have a “homeland security” dimension in the event that the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station at Wintersburg, which the new road will pass close to, blows a stack, allowing for the rapidly developing West Valley of Phoenix to be evacuated. And “rapidly developing” is no exaggeration: It’s the fastest-growing part of our fast-growing state. Small wonder that Bill Gates, the former Microsoft head who once was reckoned to be the richest man in the world, bought up a 20,000-acre tract of land between the White Tank and Belmont Mountains for a reported $80 million. The location, as it happens, is right in the path of the proposed interstate, assuring the likelihood of a handsome return on the investment.

Why build a new interstate that will destroy prime desert land, disrupt wildlife corridors, churn up public domain holdings, turn national parks and monuments into islands, and effectively bypass existing cities and their infrastructure in favor of seeding new ones in a state already strapped for water in the face of a quickly changing climate? Why, money, of course: Money for agricultural interests, trucking companies, landowners, developers, roadbuilders, all the usual suspects. Money for unseen future interests as well—perhaps for the Spanish conglomerate, for instance, that has turned the Indiana segment of Interstate 80, which American taxpayers paid for years ago, into a private toll road that generates billions of dollars annually. Doubtless such a concern is waiting in the wings, for, as former Bush administration US Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters notes, “While per-gallon fuel taxes served as a proxy for our highway needs in the past, the pending insolvency of the federal Highway Trust Fund proves that model to be unsustainable.” Funding new highways, in other words, will come from other sources—including the possibility of mileage taxes, private ownership, tolls, and the like.

Meanwhile, building I–11 along the route that ADOT’s planners hope for will cost untold billions of dollars—and at least $3.4 billion over improving existing highways in Tucson alone. Tucson civic leaders have voiced opposition to the new road precisely for the reason that the money would be better spent locally rather than bypass the city altogether. It would certainly be possible to use existing roads, though it would be messy: Just look at I–10 around Houston, parts of which in west of downtown run eleven lanes wide, and anyone who has to travel the interstate in town or between Tucson and Phoenix will probably not be enthusiastic at the prospect of yet more traffic filling an ocean of asphalt. Almost as if a threat as much as a scenario, some ADOT planners have even advanced the notion of a stacked I–10 through Tucson, the upper deck headed north and the lower deck headed south, which seems to offer a little slice of hell for future motorists.

That future is very much of concern, for unless vast pots of money magically appear, it may take ten or twenty years for a 268-mile-long new highway to be completed. A lot can happen in that time, including the possibility of driverless vehicles that can efficiently use existing roads—or the development of newer and better forms of transportation, such as high-speed trains, that can deliver goods transcontinentally in far less time than any semi could. The age of the highway and of the automobile may well be drawing to an end, should be drawing to an end, though there are powerful forces at work seeking to extract every last cent possible from a fossil-fuel-based economy and opposed to anything that looks progressive, renewable, or “soft.” One of the last big highway bills was passed under the Obama administration, and even there the president slated $8 billion for the development of high-speed intercity freight and passenger railroads. Retrograde in every respect, the Obama administration’s successors have been busy undoing that, of course.

How do you and I benefit from a road that will speed up the transport of winter vegetables from Mexico to Canada? How does Arizona benefit from a diminished, fragmented desert ecosystem? It doesn’t, and unless you’re a mogul in the making, you and I don’t. But those powerful interests are at work, and landowners and developers, especially in the Phoenix area, are already counting their money as the Valley continues its inexorable sprawl, now to the west.

This is a road to nowhere, and it should be opposed. The Arizona Department of Transportation is accepting comments from the public until July 8, and we urge all those who care about the health of the Sonoran Desert to urge ADOT to find other alternatives—whether following existing roads or scrapping the project altogether. Comments—a simple “no” will do—can be sent online at www.i11study.com/Arizona, delivered by voice at (844) 544–8049, or sent by mail to I–11 Tier 1 EIS Study Team, c/o ADOT Communications, 1655 W. Jackson Street Mail Drop 126F, Phoenix, AZ 85007.