If you want the full-on, bone-jolting East Grant Road experience, now is the time.
The road may never again be as bad as it is right now until the end of February between North Tucson Boulevard and North Country Club Road. Southwest Gas is replacing pipes in a stretch of road already notorious for car-eating potholes, which means metal plates in the road are now adding to the amusement-park lurches of the ride.
When the utility is done digging, probably by March, the city will embark on a million-dollar milling-and-repaving process that will replace the pavement on a three-mile stretch from north Santa Rita Road to North Columbus. That new pavement was an ad hoc measure pulled together late last year and will only last until it’s torn up again for reconstruction of the road.
It’s a very Tucson situation, this East Grant Road mess, highlighting our traditional deficiencies while bringing up a couple of strengths as well. Where else would they wind up putting down new pavement that will start being torn up after a year or two?
The reasons date back decades. Plans to widen East Grant have existed long enough that the city bought properties along the road back in 1990, 25 years ago now, to make room.
On Tuesday I stopped by one of the houses the city bought in 1991, near the corner of North Campbell Avenue and East Grant. It’s a four-bedroom block house that the city rented out as a group home for a while. Over the last 10 years, a family has been living there, raising kids, renting from the city, waiting for the widening to force them out.
It’s taking long enough that the kids could almost go to college first.
Why so long? That’s where Tucson’s faults come in. Although planners stated the eventual need for a six-lane road along East Grant 25 years ago, no formal proposal made it anywhere till 2002. Even then, that was a plan for “grade-separated interchanges” at several important intersections, not a widening. And strong neighborhood opposition prompted voters to shoot it down by a wide margin.
Still, the long-term plan was for a wider Grant Road. And finally in 2006 the voters approved it in the election that established the Regional Transportation Authority and started a countywide, half-cent sales tax to fund projects such as widening Grant from North Oracle Road to North Swan Road.
Then Tucson’s beloved process intervened. The Grant revamp was scheduled into the second, third and fourth five-year periods of the 20-year plan. Public input was solicited to avoid the pitfalls of previous years and get the least objectionable plan.
“We needed to be far more sensitive in responding to the concerns that were already expressed about grade separation,” said Jim DeGrood, deputy director of the Regional Transportation Authority.
Over the years, owners had declined to invest in properties that might be paved over anyway. The street deteriorated. Nobody wanted to put money into a place that was doomed. It became an embarrassment.
Still, many neighbors questioned the need for the widening, as opposed to creating pull-outs for buses, better-timed lights and other smaller changes that wouldn’t add three lanes of pavement going each way.
Bob Schlanger has been bird-dogging the project since it was passed. Now he’s preparing for his home, which fronts on East Edison Street a block south of Grant, to have a new, back-gate border on Grant when the house to the north is taken down.
“All the big money interests keep wanting a crosstown freeway,” he told me. “If there were a way to flip a switch and turn it into bus pullouts and timed traffic lights, I’d do it in a heartbeat.”
But of course most of us who don’t live there and simply use the street for driving will likely welcome the wider road. Even Karin Uhlich, the City Council member who represents the area and is sensitive to neighborhood and activist opinion, recognizes the need.
“I think Grant Road as it stands and as it has been for the last few decades is an eyesore and not functional as a roadway,” she said.
She and Mayor Jonathan Rothschild are working with the RTA to accelerate the project, Uhlich said. As it is, though, the stretch between North Stone and North Park is not likely to be done until the end of 2017. Then there are the next two phases of more than a mile each before the road is complete to Swan in perhaps 2021.
Uhlich would like it done years sooner, and the RTA is open to shuffling the schedules.
“The timeline is pretty much the city’s to call,” DeGrood said.
So now, after so many years, the city is about to have new pavement on its most infamous road, then quickly replace it with a long and deliberately considered reconstruction that could revitalize one of its key arterial streets.
The outcome sounds great, but oh, that Tucson process.
