Highway 95 improvements set to begin

Photo By Mark Schauer | A stretch of Highway 95 from Avenue 9E to just north of Rifle Range Road will be expanded to five lanes, a project that will take roughly one year to complete. The stretch of Highway 95 that runs from Avenue 9E to Aberdeen Road, just outside of Yuma, Ariz., has poor lighting, multiple blind curves, and inconsistent shoulder width.  

YUMA PROVING GROUND, AZ, UNITED STATES

02.11.2021

Story by Mark Schauer 

U.S. Army Yuma Proving Ground

After decades of danger, Highway 95’s road to safe status is about to begin.

Starting this summer, a stretch of Highway 95 from Avenue 9E to just north of Rifle Range Road will be expanded to five lanes, a project that will take roughly one year to complete.

Concurrently, long-awaited left and right turn lanes will be added to Highway 95’s intersection with Dome Valley Road.

In summer 2022, construction to widen the Wellton-Mohawk Bridge to five lanes will begin. Though the $29 million allocated by the State of Arizona in 2019 includes money to design the stretch of road connecting the five lanes ending at Rifle Range Road to the Wellton-Mohawk Bridge, but not enough to construct it. When future money will be available to continue the project is undetermined at this time.

“That will come down to what the budget looks like,” said Rep. Tim Dunn, who represents District 13 in the Arizona State House of Representatives. “COVID has set the state back a little bit, but we’re actually rebounding better than we thought.”

Aside from having the highest traffic volume of any two lane road in Arizona, the stretch of Highway 95 that runs from Avenue 9E to Aberdeen Road has poor lighting, multiple blind curves, and inconsistent shoulder width. The morning and evening commutes to and from the proving ground have long been dubbed the ‘YPG 500,’ an amusing sobriquet if not for the grim list of lives the road has claimed over the past decades. In command surveys of YPG personnel, having to drive daily on Highway 95 is often cited as the worst aspect of being employed at the proving ground—one Army veteran who now works at YPG as a civilian said they found the experience more consistently frightening than multiple deployments to Iraq. The road is shared not only with farm vehicles working the adjacent fields, but also with winter visitors whose presence normally doubles Yuma’s population.

“We have a farm on Highway 95, so we see the ‘YPG 500’ every day,” said Dunn. “We understand how much traffic is on that road and how dangerous it is.”

Funding is the principal impediment to fixing the longstanding road deficiencies, and barring intervention will remain a chronic problem. All told, Arizona’s counties alone have in excess of 20,000 miles of paved and unpaved roadways to maintain. Arizona’s gasoline tax is the seventh-lowest in the nation, hasn’t increased since the early 1990s, and has lost more than 35% of its original value due to inflation.

Completing Highway 95’s expansion to five lanes all the way to the Aberdeen Road entrance of YPG’s Kofa Firing Range will cost approximately $80 million more than his been allocated to date. State leaders hope to ensure additional stretches are funded as YPG’s prominence at the forefront of the Army’s current modernization efforts grows.

“With all of the additional testing coming out to YPG, we know it is going to get busier,” said Dunn.

• Date Taken: 02.11.2021
• Date Posted: 02.18.2021 09:48
• Story ID: 388890
• Location: YUMA PROVING GROUND, AZ, US