Navajo County is located in the northeastern Arizona. This region of the State, which includes one of Arizona’s major destinations – the “White Mountains,” is experiencing rapid population and economic growth. Navajo County recently completed, in cooperation with Apache County, the Southern Navajo County/Apache County Sub-Regional Transportation Plan to address growing transportation issues and challenges facing the County’s White Mountain communities.
This plan focused on the transportation needs of southern Navajo County and its member communities of Snowflake, Taylor, Show Low and Pinetop-Lakeside. Recent intensification of development activity in other parts of the County, coupled with anticipated natural regional growth, has led to the need for a broader Regional Transportation Plan (RTP). This RTP is intended to comprehensively address a range of transportation issues and infrastructure needs associated with key County growth centers and the connectivity of these centers. This effort, therefore, expands upon the Sub-Regional Plan to identify transportation and mobility needs throughout that part of Navajo County outside the boundaries of the Hopi, Navajo, and Fort Apache Indian reservations. Tribal land transportation systems are not included within the scope of this RTP.
Navajo County and the cities of Holbrook and Winslow have teamed up with the Arizona Department of Transportation (ADOT) to complete this Regional Transportation Plan (RTP). The overall scope of the RTP is similar to a Small Area Transportation Study (SATS) that ADOT has assisted communities in developing in recent years. The primary objective of ADOT’s SATS program is to help communities develop a transportation plan for a defined local area that will guide multi-modal planning and programming on local roads over a 20-year timeframe. A SATS involves inventorying current conditions for all travel modes, identifying deficiencies, forecasting future needs, and identifying and analyzing alternative solutions. Ultimately, the SATS provides the basis for developing a program of recommended transportation improvements and formulating a staged implementation guide to meet short-, mid-, and long-range needs. This RTP will accomplish these same tasks, but the area of study will include all of Navajo County, exclusive of the Indian reservations.
