If you work, live or just frequent downtown Tucson, you’ve probably seen the massive roadway project that for the past several years has weaved its way across the southern edge of downtown.
It’s the Downtown Links project, a 1.3-mile long, multimodal corridor connecting Maclovio Barraza-Aviation Parkway to the Interstate 10 frontage road, and it is now in the final stages of construction.
Links, a Regional Transportation Authority-funded project, will serve as a crosstown parkway that extends from Palo Verde Road to the I-10 frontage at St. Mary’s Road. The original section, from Palo Verde to Broadway, was constructed in the 1990s as part of an Arizona Department of Transportation program first conceived in the 1980s.
The east- and west-end roadway sections of the project were completed in 2023 and 2014, respectively. Now, the most complicated and complex segment of the whole project is nearing completion.
“The transformational features, such as the roadway crossing under the new railroad bridge, have been completed, and now the functional features have to be added,” said Rick Ellis, Pima Association of Governments’ Director of Transportation Services.
Construction challenges to this stage have included temporary rerouting railroad tracks, building drainage facilities and constructing the roadway undercrossing to pass beneath the Union Pacific Railroad tracks. All this had to be done without disrupting rail traffic.
With these challenges met, workers now have to finalize the connection of the fiber optic communication lines, which is time-consuming and specialized work. This and other remaining work that has to be done to tie everything together adds up to what Ellis described as “playing reverse Jenga,” referring to the game where players remove wooden blocks from a tower one-by-one in hopes of not collapsing the structure.
“All of these things have to occur in a specific sequence, rather than in parallel so that everything comes together seamlessly at the end,” Ellis said.
Fortunately, the work is progressing, and the project is expected to wrap up by the end of the year to mark another successful completion of nearly 30 RTA-funded roadway corridor projects or project phases
The completed Downtown Links project will include:
- A HAWK pedestrian crossing signal at the newly completed section of Downtown Links near Sixth Street
- A new four-lane road linking Broadway and Sixth Street
- A new bridge, including a multi-use pedestrian bridge
- A Sixth Street underpass beneath the railroad underpass
- Extensive drainage improvements
The City of Tucson is the lead agency on the project. The voter-approved RTA plan provided more than $76 million in funding for the Downtown Links project from its 20-year half-cent sales tax.