Arizona Ranks 30th in the Nation Cost-Effectiveness and Condition

According to the Annual Highway Report by Reason Foundation, this is a one-spot improvement from Arizona’s ranking of 28th in the last evaluation of the condition, safety, and costs of roads and bridges in all 50 states.

In safety and condition categories, Arizona’s highways rank 12th in urban Interstate pavement condition, 41st in rural Interstate pavement condition, 20th in urban arterial pavement condition, 30th in rural arterial pavement condition, 1st in structurally deficient bridges, 38th in urban fatality rate, and 45th in rural fatality rate.

Arizona ranks 30th out of the 50 states in traffic congestion, and its drivers spend 23 hours a year stuck in traffic congestion.

In spending and cost-effectiveness, Arizona ranks 27th in capital and bridge disbursements, which are the costs of building new roads and bridges and widening existing ones. Arizona ranks 7th in maintenance spending, such as the costs of repaving roads and filling in potholes. Arizona’s administrative disbursements, including office spending that doesn’t make its way to roads, ranks 41st nationwide.

The categories in which the state improved the most from the previous report were in capital-bridge disbursements (46th to 27th) and other disbursements (44th to 30th).

Arizona worsened the most in the other fatality rate (18th to 41st).

Compared to neighboring and nearby states, Arizona’s overall highway performance is worse than Utah’s (8th), but better than New Mexico’s (38th) and Colorado’s (43rd).

Comparing its overall performance to similarly populated states, Arizona ranks behind Tennessee (5th) but ahead of Washington (47th).

Arizona’s highway system ranks 29th out of 50 states overall this year, ranked 30th in last year’s report, and was 29th in the nation five years ago in 2019.

“In terms of improving in the road condition and performance categories, Arizona should focus on improving its administrative disbursements per mile, rural Interstate pavement condition, rural fatality rate, and other fatality rate. Arizona ranks in the bottom 10 of all the states in each of these categories,” said Baruch Feigenbaum, lead author of the 28th Annual Highway Report and senior managing director of transportation policy at Reason Foundation. “Arizona should also prioritize reducing the number of traffic fatalities on urban and rural roads.”

*2021 data
The Annual Highway Report is based on spending and performance data submitted by state highway agencies to the federal government and urban congestion data from the Texas A&M Transportation Institute for 2020 as well as bridge condition data from the Better Roads inventory for 2021. For more details on the calculation of each of the 13 performance measures used in the report, as well as the overall performance measure, please refer to the appendix in the main report. The report’s dataset includes Interstate, federal, and state roads, but not county or local roads. All rankings are based on performance measures that are ratios rather than absolute values: the financial measures are disbursements per mile, the fatality rate is fatalities per 100 million vehicle-miles of travel, the urban congestion measure is the annual delay per auto commuter, and the others are percentages. For example, the state ranking 1^st in structurally deficient bridges has the smallest percentage of structurally deficient bridges, not the smallest number of structurally deficient bridges.