Country Club Way Is Preparing For A Makeover

The city of Tempe, Arizona, is still in the beginning stages of designing a new pedestrian improvement project before builders begin construction in 2022 , according to comments made at a public meeting back in September.

A brief public meeting was held on September 23, 2020, to discuss the introductory stages of finalizing the potential designs. At the moment, the group is only at 15% in the design process. By the end of 2021 they hope to be completely finished so they can begin building their design shortly after the start of 2022.

The Country Club Way Bicycle and Pedestrian Improvement Project has been in the works since 2016. The last time the project group reached out to the public to get feedback was in 2017. Since then, the team has worked on other factors of the project.

In a forum on the Tempe website, the public was, and is still able to, provide feedback on the design process as well as some additional elements.

“Some of the higher-ranking priorities [SK4] included landscaping, safety, as well as traffic calming for the corridor,” said Chase Walman, the city of Tempe’s Transportation Planner.
Over the course of the last four or so years, the project committee has worked toward three main goals. These objectives include creating an eco-friendlier environment through landscaping, receiving additional funding and developing a safe and useful design.

According to a presentation from April 2017, this project will stretch from Warner Road at ASU Research Park to Rio Salado Mixed Use Project at Tempe Marketplace. This path is about seven miles in total.

“The project will include a 10-foot wide concrete path, an adjacent equestrian path (between Warner and Elliot roads), landscaping, lighting, shade nodes, and a pedestrian-activated traffic signal at Warner Road,” said Tempe’s government website. There will also be bike lanes, ADA access points and potential water fountains.

To get a better understanding of the location of this project, it will roughly follow the alignment of Country Club Way.

Because of where this path will be located, it connects neighborhoods to employment centers to parks to schools and more. This will make it easily accessible to the surrounding community and help promote the use of the path in general.

One concern of the public was disruption to the neighborhoods adjacent to the pathway whether that disruption be noise or lighting.

“We want to make sure that the light spillage is mitigated as well as privacy because you’re on bikes or horses,” said Tempe Senior Traffic Engineer, Ray Yparraguirre. “We just want to make sure that we take a look at those considerations.”

It will have been six years working on this project before they take the design outside and begin the construction process. “We don't have a time frame yet,” says Walman. It will take a minimum of 8 months to build, he said.

Walman, Yparraguirre and the rest of the design team are excited about their next steps in the process of this pedestrian improvement project.