One remarkable thing about Phoenix is that it's actually a very, very populous metro (currently the 12th most populous Metropolitan Statistical Area, just shy of the northern two-thirds of the Bay Area in 11th place [1]) in what's essentially the middle of nowhere -- and I'm not using this term as facetiously as you may suspect.
Phoenix has poor connectivity to just about everywhere else, is on a detour (I-10) from the straight-line Tucson to San Diego road (I-8) and is skipped by Union Pacific's main railroad line between Yuma and El Paso. It's bypassed completely by I-40, the successor to the famous Route 66 as the road from the midwest to the California coast, and by BNSF's southern transcon that follows that route closely. The road linking it with its nearest big neighbor, Las Vegas, despite recently having been expanded to a divided highway, is still vastly short of an interstate [2]. To get towards Flagstaff or Prescott (or towards Vegas) you have to climb out of the Gila basin.
And yet, despite these odds and the oppressive summer heat, the desert floor is covered in Phoenix' rectangular sprawl for nearly 50 consecutive miles. More so than perhaps any other large city, it creates it own demand just by the virtue of existing.
The sprawling Phoenix area reaches four rivers in Arizona: the Salt, Verde, Gila, and Agua Fria rivers.
And it's mostly flat land that's easy to build on and farm.
That geography made it valuable to the Hohokam people, and I've heard that their irrigation systems supported the largest population in the Southwest by 1300. [1]
It was a good place to build a city, until it outgrew its water supply.
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One remarkable thing about Phoenix is that it's actually a very, very populous metro (currently the 12th most populous Metropolitan Statistical Area, just shy of the northern two-thirds of the Bay Area in 11th place [1]) in what's essentially the middle of nowhere -- and I'm not using this term as facetiously as you may suspect.
Phoenix has poor connectivity to just about everywhere else, is on a detour (I-10) from the straight-line Tucson to San Diego road (I-8) and is skipped by Union Pacific's main railroad line between Yuma and El Paso. It's bypassed completely by I-40, the successor to the famous Route 66 as the road from the midwest to the California coast, and by BNSF's southern transcon that follows that route closely. The road linking it with its nearest big neighbor, Las Vegas, despite recently having been expanded to a divided highway, is still vastly short of an interstate [2]. To get towards Flagstaff or Prescott (or towards Vegas) you have to climb out of the Gila basin.
And yet, despite these odds and the oppressive summer heat, the desert floor is covered in Phoenix' rectangular sprawl for nearly 50 consecutive miles. More so than perhaps any other large city, it creates it own demand just by the virtue of existing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Metropolitan_Statistic...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_11#History
The sprawling Phoenix area reaches four rivers in Arizona: the Salt, Verde, Gila, and Agua Fria rivers.
And it's mostly flat land that's easy to build on and farm.
That geography made it valuable to the Hohokam people, and I've heard that their irrigation systems supported the largest population in the Southwest by 1300. [1]
It was a good place to build a city, until it outgrew its water supply.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hohokam
I-10 goes all the way across the country. I-8 goes from San Diego to I-10. So I would say I-8 is the detour.