There are many things I don't like about Phoenix, so I'm going to start off slowly and work myself up to the really good stuff, which I'll probably write once I know I'm actually leaving this place (or perhaps I'll wait until after I'm actually gone, we'll see).

My first set of complaints will concern two things that have always been problems here, namely, Roads and Water.

Roads

When I first lived in the Phoenix area, highways were not so common.  We had I-17, or The Black Canyon Highway (or is it Freeway?) and I-10 meandering through town bewteen LA and Tucson, and maybe route 60 to head out to the middle of nowhere in the south-east part of the metro area and a couple of other minor disjoint routes, but aside from that it was a sorry street map.  The grid system is really nice, unless you need to cut across large swaths of it.

So at some point the city elders decided to build some freeways.  Great!  They designed an outer loop, a nice east-side North-South expressway sort of thing, a freeway that cuts across some of the southern part of the valley, and some other routes that join things together better.  These are the 101, the 51, and the 202.  There are others in the works, and other freeways were joined together with other state routes, so in general there is a more reasonable road system to work with.  "More" is relative.

The problem I have here is that for as long as they were building these roads, the population of the Phoenix metro area has increased exponentially.  Rather than address this during planning stages (I can't say whether the issue was known at that point) or at any time during construction, they've left the whole valley with a system of freeways that are all 3 lanes wide.  With 140,000 people having moved into the area in 2004, you can imagine how bad things are.

Add to this the fact that as the fifth largest city in the country, Phoenix has no trains or subways, a poor carpool infrastructure (part-time HOV lanes, bi-fueled vehicles are permitted to use these lanes even if they are single-occupant and running on gasoline, etc), and a horrendously bad bus system.  Phoenix is a sprawling city that is becoming increasingly dependant on single-occupancy cars to make long commutes on crowded freeways and overused surface streets.

There is a light rail plan in the design stages now, but anyone who has used a light rail system (there will be only one main route as far as I've seen) knows that it might fill in gaps in a larger public transportation plan, but a light rail line on its own is no magic bullet.

In the mean time, the 51-101 junction at the north end of town goes from a 3-lane 51 freeway to 4 lanes (briefly) and then to 2 lanes headed to the 101 West and 2 to the 101 East.  These two lanes become little raceways as people jockey for position to merge onto the 101 in their respective directions.  There is a 4 lane stretch for merging that quickly cuts down to 3 lanes, and I can't count how many times people change lanes into that merge stretch to attempt to pass, cutting off people getting onto the 101.  That's just one little snippet of an example.

Water

From the moment I moved back to Phoenix, I noticed something.  Well, I noticed two tings.  First of all, this is still a desert.  It is as dry as can be here up until August or so, when it becomes uncomfortably humid and generally horrible.

The second thing, though, is that people here love to water their lawns during the day.  They love to water their lawns during the day for hours at a time.  My neighbors on my street have been known to water their lawns in the early part of the afternoon-- when it is hottest and evaporation occurs most rapidly-- for 1 or 2 hours at a time!  The lawn, sidewalks, gutters, and even some grass in a small mini-park at the end of the street all get watered.  Since i was about 6 years old (when we moved here), I've heard advisories from the water departments here that clearly state that the best time to water landscaping is just prior to sunrise, and new bubbler systems make aerosol sprinkler heads obsolete.  Too much trouble to at least change the timer?

I see people watering their driveways, over-watering their landscaping, running fountains, and playing plenty of golf (hopefully watered with impotable water), but just like gasoline [which is another topic for another day] people here seem to think that we have an unbreechable supply of it.

The problem is, Phoenix does have such a supply.  Or so it seems.  People in other cities and regions of the state have water usage policies and they all pay more for water than people in Pheonix do.  While someone in Phoenix can water their lawn every day care free, someone in Tucson might get fined for doing the same thing, since that's a waste of water.

About a year ago there was talk of legislation to create a water conservation plan.  Arizona was enjoying some huge summer forest fires and a long-lasting drought that prompted this discussion, and I was thinking that maybe they had finally figured it out [that we live in a DESERT].  Then, we had a nice run of rain that not only washed a whole bunch of debris from the ground surface into our water treatment plants (causing system failures and suspected turbidity in the delivered water supply for two days), but it also appears to have re-filled years and years of missing water from the reservoirs.  The result?  All talk of a water conservation policy was tabled.

I'll end this section with the same rant fragment I've been tossing around since I was in high school.  Tons of people here have backyard swimming pools.  Every single summer (and other times of the year), Phoenix becomes a death trap, with little kids drowning in pools weekly and even daily sometimes.  There has been some improvement, but the Memorial Day holiday weekend in 2005 had three (3) drownings alone.  By 2005, that total number should always be way, way, way closer to zero than it is.  It's sad, but it's yet another indicator.