Provides insights on historical and current issues in transportation planning. The first section describes the last five decades of planning efforts, funding initiatives and the increasing use of the roadway system. The second section is a series of fact sheets and maps of each subregion that presents the extent of the roadways, traffic volumes on major streets, transit and bicycle facility availability, future planned improvements, issues within the subregion, an overlay of the draft biological reserve, and in the northwest, a further overlay of pygmy-owl habitat with a detailed analysis of bond projects.

Provides background information relevant to the Circulation Element of the draft Comprehensive Land Use Plan. It describes historic traffic volumes for roads within the various subregional planning areas of Pima County, and compare Pima County trends to national data in areas such as vehicle ownership, travel time, vehicle miles traveled, work trip modes of travel, registration, and vehicle costs.

The historical range of the ferruginous pygmy-owl included areas of southern Arizona, southern Texas extending south along both coasts in Mexico, through Central America into the southernmost population in Argentina. However, over the past 150 years urban and agricultural expansion within the United States has reduced its population to a few isolated pockets of uncertain stability.

Most of the owls until just the last couple of years have been found in residential areas in northwest Tucson. It take a lot of cooperation on the parts of private residents to help get the work done. These are incredible little birds that fill an interesting role in the environment since they are more diurnal versus nocturnal. Our objective is to gather as much information as fast as possible to feed into the process to make this County plan based on the best available science that we have.

Pima County contracted with Arizona Game and Fish Department to conduct telemetry analysis and gather information that would lead to effective conservation and recovery initiatives for the cactus ferruginous pygmy-owl. During 1997, banded birds were monitored. Beginning in 1998 and during 1999, pygmy-owls were radio-marked with backpack transmitters and followed on foot or by vehicle.