Monday was the first full day of morning traffic for the new Loop 202 South Mountain Freeway. The final stretch of the freeway opened right before the holidays.
“Traffic was light or moderate really for most of the morning on South Mountain Freeway,” said Arizona Department of Transportation spokesman Tom Herrmann. “Anecdotally at least it looked very good.”
But ADOT isn’t collecting traffic data yet and can’t say how many people are using the road, which connects west Phoenix with Chandler in a route that runs south of South Mountain Park/Preserve. Driver numbers for I-10 on Monday morning was not available.
The state Department of Public Safety reported no major incidents.
Troopers are being reassigned from other areas to cover the new freeway, DPS spokesman Bart Graves said.
“We’ll look at the call load of various highways and we’ll move troopers there accordingly,” he said.
Graves said the death of a wrong-way driver on the South Mountain Freeway over the weekend didn’t have anything to do with the highway itself.
Another highway, I-17, is where the state’s studying a wrong-way detection system.
