TUCSON, Ariz. (KGUN) — You can face a bumpy ride home in a lot of Tucson neighborhoods. Tucsonans voted to spend sales tax money to fix neighborhood streets. Now the city is moving ahead to the second part of a ten year plan.
Life can be a rough road—especially if you and your car endure regular runs down Tucson’s neighborhood streets.
To help smooth rocky roads and ruffled feathers, Tucson voters approved Prop 411. It extended a half cent sales tax people were already paying to put down fresh pavement on neighborhood streets.
The City of Tucson says 32 percent of Prop 411 roads are fixed or under construction so now it’s chosen the roads for Phase Two.
If you thought of Phase Two as one long, one lane road it would be 931 miles of fresh pavement.
Instead of a list the city website has an interactive map. We really can’t explore the whole thing on air so we visited a Phase 2 neighborhood southeast of Speedway and Pantano.
There, Kevin Krc told us Tucson roads forced him to replace parts of his truck and his motorcycle.
“You drive down these roads, you just see chunks of the road just coming out. And of course, on a motorcycle, you've got to dip and dodge all those as well too. It's a big safety issue, especially on a motorcycle.”
Some members of the Jefferson Park Neighborhood Association were settling down for some cards when we checked in on their Prop 411 experience.
They say their midtown neighborhood is part way through Phase One repaving, in part because it’s an older neighborhood that needed water main work first. Cindy Doklan says for now they have to be patient and keep bumping along.
She says driving on the streets repaired so far is lovely, but on the other streets it’s: “Like driving on the edge of a volcano, I would say, a little bit of chunks and ripples and holes. The city’s really good about coming in and patching, but patches don't last that long.”
