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When one talks about growth, it's useful to start out with some basic premises that I have found to be mostly true in my work in this area:
The new residents will bring change to our region. With a bigger market comes more options. We'll have a bigger selections of restaurants, movies, and stores. Hopefully, we will have more people to support the civic activities and arts. We will have more diversity of tastes and activities to cater to them.
Our new sophistication and market strength will come with some problems that we've got to think about now if we are to avoid, or at least minimize them. For example, our on-road vehicle travel is projected to increase faster than population growth (MAG Long Range 1977 Transportation Plan and Update). Even if we complete our freeway system and build another 114 miles of freeway and 2,629 miles of regional streets, by 2020 the number of vehicle miles traveled is projected to increase 78% from 58.8 to 102.2 million. We will have more congested lane miles and more congested intersections. In fact peak hour congested lane miles are projected to increase 78%, and the number of congested intersections are projected to increase 36%. We will be sitting in traffic along with all of our new neighbors.
We will also be driving further distances. The number of vehicle miles per capita increased 4.7% from 1997 to 2020. This means in 2020 we will spend another 24 hours - an entire day - each year, just sitting in our cars. The increased trips and travel distances add to our air quality problems. The Tribune Newspapers survey found that almost 3/4 of our residents stated that maintaining high air quality standards was important to maintaining the quality of life in the valley.
While we have reduced the number of federal carbon monoxide air quality violations to zero this year (down from over 100 a decade ago) cleaning our air has required that we make significant changes. We can't burn wood fires on certain days, businesses with more than 50 employees file trip reduction plans and implement trip reduction programs.
But growth in itself is not the cause of our air quality, open space, or traffic problems. And that is why stopping, or even drastically slowing population growth won't change our problems. How we manage our growth, however, can affect these areas. One of the most important ways to manage growth is to examine how we use our land to accommodate now residents and business.
The overall density of the Phoenix metropolitan region is somewhere between 3 and 4 units to the acre. But if you just look at the developed residential acreage, it's close to 11.5 units to the acre. What this tells us is that we are using our land inefficiently - we are leaving large disjointed areas inside our urban areas which are undeveloped while we continue to build outward. We are sprawling.
At our current overall densities we will develop another 300+ square miles of land by 2020. Much of this development will occur in undeveloped desert. (Mag Desert Spaces Plan, 1995). These areas are important to our economy, for tourism, for our cultural heritage, for agriculture and ranching, and for wildlife protection. Because our development patterns are low density, and our subdivision design is oriented to autos, and we have a single-use oriented development patterns, this situation is becoming more difficult as we continue to grow.
This type of spatial arrangement limits our options with regards to transportation alternatives (busses, bicycling, and walking) that could help us reduce congestion and improve our air quality. For example, typical subdivision design in the region is auto oriented. What this really means is that people don't have transportation choices. Our subdivisions are replete with features that make it hard for the typical resident to easily access a bus. Walls around subdivisions and cul de sacs that make it a long walk from home to the transit stop. Sometimes we use gates that keep out strangers, but also shut out the potential for a convenient public transportation. In most of these subdivisions, anyone who wants to take public transit has to walk through the entire development to the gated entry to access public transit.
Most residents in the Valley can't drive to work, take care of household errands or even go out to lunch without using a car. Schools, shopping, and work are located outside most subdivisions in other single use districts. To enter these areas, a car is almost required. And these uses are also walled off, making it necessary for the non-driving elderly and children who want to buy a carton of milk or rent a video to walk along streets with high traffic volumes and cross through large parking lots. If you can't afford a car your job options are limited to employers accessible to a transit system that has the lowest expenditure per capita of our western peer cities (Regional Public Transit Authority).
Providing transportation alternatives is difficult, and is a double edged sword. The development community will build what the market demands, and it doesn't demand subdivisions that are transit-friendly. When the market supports transit friendly development, they will provide it. The public asks why they should pay for a product that doesn't work given how we live and work. However, based on the recent Tempe vote to support public transit, and similar actions under consideration in Scottsdale and Phoenix, the public will lead the way in this area.
From a public perspective, it's hard for elected politicians to ask business to reorient building plans, build mixed use, use less parking, and encourage their employees to use alternative modes when there are few real pedestrian environments, and a bus system that offers limited service. In this area land is less expensive and larger tracts are available on the periphery than in urban areas, so that is where most of the development takes place. It leaps over marginally developed low intensity areas on the fringe to raw desert.
To give you some perspective on how much longer these trends can continue, Maricopa County is 9,226 square miles. The cities and towns, or urbanized areas, constitute less than 16% of that total. About 2,500 (25%) square miles include areas that growth where large population increases are not anticipated to occur - the Tonto National Forest (935 square miles), the Goldwater Gunnery Range (1,277 square miles), and American Indian communities (395 square miles). Besides these political divisions, we have no natural boundaries that would contain our developed area.
Our current development pattern creates another problem - provision of infrastructure. As communities grow, they want things like parks, schools, fire and police services. Jurisdictions often have to provide these services for newly developing areas which do not produce the revenues to support them. As these rapidly growing areas demand urban services, public funds are shifted away from maintenance of the existing infrastructure to new construction. For example, we now spend seven times more on building new roads than we do on retrofitting existing ones (excluding maintenance). Development fees are an attempt to make development pay its own way. In the Phoenix metropolitan area we have development fees that average from $2,000 to $4,000 per dwelling unit. Several jurisdictions are considering raising those fees. As sprawl continues, this trend will continue. In San Diego, the average fee is $20,000 for a single family home.
In our region, school districts are also strained. Many have reached their bonding capacity, and are unable to build new schools or refurbish existing facilities. The town of Gilbert implemented a moratorium on building permits until it can solve its school situation.
How do we get out of this Gordian knot? Clearly we are not going to stop development. But we can use our infrastructure more efficiently. This means changing our development and land use patterns to ones that offer choices in transportation, make the most efficient use of our infrastructure, and conserve our valuable natural resources. In our region, we're looking at a variety of ways to do this. Our region recognizes that open space preservation, transportation, air quality, and urban sprawl are regional issues. We already have several mechanisms in place to address some of these areas, and we are looking at several ways to address others. One of the most important resources we have in the Valley is our open space. A study done by the Hyatt Hotel Corporation found that while our weather and golf courses put us in the top resort competition, it's our natural environment, our petroglyphs, and cactus that make our region a unique attraction. Once we loose those resources, we are like any other area with good weather and a lot of golf courses. Open spaces are important to our residents. The Mesa Tribune survey found that 82% of Maricopa County residents said that maintaining the desert and mountain scenery is important to their quality of life. Many of our important natural areas are to the north of our region where the bulk of our growth is projected to occur.
There is a growing sentiment that we must act now to protect our resources. The recent support of a Scottsdale sales tax to fund acquisition of the McDowell Mountains is evidence of the growing sentiment to protect our natural resources. But this support is not new, evidenced by the Phoenix Mountains Preserve - another citizen supported effort to use public funds to purchase resources threatened by urban growth.
Another important effort has been the development of the Maricopa Association of Governments open space plan. This plan identifies over 4 million acres (almost 4,000 square miles) of significant open space areas that would create a regionwide system centered around our regionally significant waterways and mountains. The system would be accessible from local parks and canals. The system includes three general types of land management categories, conservation, retention, and rehabilitation. The conservation areas would be protected from all development. That means if the land is already publicly owned, it would not be traded or sold. And if it is privately owned, the public would purchase it. MAG is working on ways to finance the acquisition and maintenance of conservation areas identified in the open space plan, and on developing a set of design guidelines that could be used to set a standard for sensitive development in conservation areas.
The increase in citizen awareness of the need to plan for growth is the Region 2025 effort. The initiation of Region 2025 by MAG is a clear demonstration that cities and towns are recognizing the importance of a regional approach to managing their growth. Region 2025 is based on the recommendations of the MAG Blue Ribbon Committee, which recognized that if we are to have a quality future, we must plan for it at a regional level. The Committee recommended that this region develop a vision for the region's future, an action plan and implementation program to achieve the vision, and benchmarks to measure progress towards regional goals. It also recommended that a citizen steering committee, working with collaborative groups representing jurisdictions and civic, environmental, and business groups guide the development of the vision, action plan and implementation program.
These recommendations were not made lightly, but after the committee studied fifteen other areas that did regional planning, and traveled to San Diego, Portland, Seattle, Atlanta, and Denver to see, firsthand the benefits and drawbacks of regional planning. In each city the committee spoke to mayors, businesses, environmentalists, neighborhood groups, city and regional planning staff, and the media.
In April, the Regional Council (Valley mayors and other elected officials) adopted a formal process for Region 2025 that follows the Blue Ribbon Committee recommendation. They too recognize that as resource issues emerge, the jurisdictions in the Valley must work together cooperatively to address them. And if we are to work together for a solution, we must have a common vision for our collective future.
To go back to that survey that I quoted in the beginning of the study, most (around 80%) residents think the quality of life is pretty good in the valley. And it is. However, we need to tend to our region, and nurture it so that it continues to grow and sustain a healthy vibrant quality of life for all its residents.