ADOT, “Update to Arizona’s Critical Urban and Rural Freight Corridor Networks,” Draft Final Report (June 2025)
The source for the Central Arizona Governments statement quoted on our home page. This is ADOT’s own report on re-designating the state’s federally recognized freight corridors, and Appendix A contains ADOT’s notes from consulting each regional planning body. The CAG consultation, dated January 23, 2025, is on report pages A69 to A70 (page 83 of the PDF file). The passage we quote is verbatim from that page. We host a copy here (21 MB) so the record doesn’t depend on ADOT’s site keeping it up. Original: azdot.gov, accessed and archived 2026-09-13, live at time of hosting.
Context, so the quote isn’t read as more than it is: CAG raised SR 77 in a freight-planning conversation, as a truck route and as a detour route when US 60, US 70, or I-10 close. They were not evaluating it as a widening candidate, and the report does not recommend widening this segment. What it shows is that the passing, shoulder, and safety problems on this road were already on the record with ADOT, from the regional planning body for Pinal County, before this coalition existed.
“SR 77/Oracle Road Multimodal Corridor Profile Study” (2007)
Pima Association of Governments, consultants including Lima & Associates. The only formal corridor study we’ve found for any part of SR 77 near here. It covers the Pima County urban/suburban section extending to roughly the Pinal County line; it does not reach Mammoth or San Manuel. We could not obtain a directly hostable copy (it lives in a CONTENTdm digital-library viewer, not a plain PDF link). External copies: Yumpu copy, Arizona Memory Project catalog entry.
ADOT “SR 77 Corridor Profile Study” (2018): a different SR 77
Listed so nobody mistakes it for a study of this corridor. ADOT did publish a Corridor Profile Study for SR 77, but it covers the Holbrook to Show Low section in Navajo County, roughly 150 miles north of here at the other end of the route. It never touches Oracle Junction, Oracle, San Manuel, or Mammoth. azdot.gov (PDF). Its existence is relevant in one way: it shows what a corridor-profile treatment for SR 77 looks like, and this stretch has never received one.
ADOT Five-Year Transportation Facilities Construction Program
We checked the current program and one full historical edition (2012 to 2016) directly for any mention of this corridor: searched for “Mammoth,” “San Manuel,” and “Oracle Junction.” Found none in either (the only “San Manuel” hit was an unrelated San Manuel airport project; the only nearby “SR 77” mentions were projects near Holbrook and Globe, hundreds of miles north). This is consistent with, not contradicting, our History page’s finding that this stretch has never been formally studied for widening.
A source that’s no longer on ADOT’s own site
ADOT published a press release on July 7, 2015 about the related widening project south of Oracle Junction, the $33.9 million project between Tangerine Road and the Pinal County line that we reference throughout this site as evidence ADOT has invested in this general area before, just never on our stretch. It was live on azdot.gov as of an October 2023 Wayback Machine capture. By mid-2025 the URL returned ADOT’s standard 403 error page, and it’s still down as of this check (2026-09-11). We don’t know why. It could be routine site cleanup unrelated to anything. We’re not asserting otherwise, just noting the fact and recovering the text so the record isn’t dependent on ADOT’s site staying up. The text below is reproduced exactly as published, including a typo in the original.
State Route 77/Oracle Road widening north of Oro Valley advancing to next phase
July 7, 2015TUCSON: As the Arizona Department of Transportation continues to make considerable progress on the project to widen State Route 77 (Oracle Road) between Oro Valley and Catalina, motorists are advised to be aware of an upcoming traffic switch that will in place by Friday, August 7.
The $33.9 million improvement project, which started in June 2014 and is more than halfway completed, includes upgrading a six-mile section of SR 77 (Oracle Road) between Tangerine Road and the Pinal County line (mileposts 82-88) and expanding the highway from two lanes to three lanes in each direction.
Beginning at 5 a.m. on August 7, all SR 77 traffic between Wilds Road and Rancho Vistoso Boulevard will be re-routed to the newly completed southbound lanes through the end of the year so crews can begin work on adding capacity to the northbound lanes. Both directions of traffic have been traveling on the northbound lanes since early this year as crews worked on improvements to the southbound lanes.
Along with widening the roadway, planned improvements include raised medians, traffic signal and drainage improvements, wildlife crossings, sound walls and multiuse paths. The widening of Oracle Road will also tie into the recently widened section of the highway from Calle Concordia to Tangerine Road.
ADOT remains on schedule to complete the project by spring 2016.