What it means
The 202 is the loop Scottsdale does not live on but cannot do without. Where the 101 wraps the city’s own east and north edges, Loop 202 wraps the metro’s east and south sides, 78 miles of it, and Scottsdale touches it at one point that matters: the Red Mountain Freeway along the Salt River, between the 101’s Pima/Price interchange and Sky Harbor. Every airport run from Old Town uses it. South on Scottsdale Road, over the river, onto the 202 west, past Tempe Town Lake and the Papago buttes, and you are at the terminals in 15 minutes when the traffic allows. The airport guide has the exits.
Locals say “the 202” with the article, in the Southern California manner they apply to every freeway here, and rarely use the segment names. When they do, “the Red Mountain” means the Tempe and Mesa stretch, “the Santan” means Chandler and Gilbert, and “the South Mountain” means the new 2019 leg around Ahwatukee that let West Valley traffic skip downtown Phoenix. The last is officially the Congressman Ed Pastor Freeway; nobody calls it that.
Where you’ll meet it
Airport directions, Diamondbacks and Suns games downtown, the drive to Mesa’s Cactus League parks and to the Beeline for Saguaro Lake, and traffic reports that treat the Pima/Price interchange as a weather system.
Where the word came from
The number is ADOT’s and the names are the landscape’s. Maricopa County voters approved a half-cent sales tax for a regional freeway system in 1985 under Proposition 300, and on December 18, 1987, the state designated two of the planned corridors as Loop 202: the East Papago and Red Mountain Freeways running east from downtown Phoenix along the Salt River, and the Santan Freeway through the southeast suburbs. The East Papago leg west of the 101 had been planned as SR 217 and the rest as SR 216 and SR 220 before the loop number swallowed them, which is why the freeway near Scottsdale clings to Papago Park and the river rather than cutting through Tempe.
Red Mountain is the red peak on the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community’s land east of Mesa, the landmark the eastbound freeway drives toward; Santan is the San Tan Mountains south of Gilbert; South Mountain is the range the final leg skirts. The Santan Freeway was completed in 2006. The Red Mountain Freeway’s last section opened on July 21, 2008, and ADOT marked it as the completion of the whole 1985 system. In 2006 a Mesa stretch of the unopened freeway played a Saudi superhighway in the film The Kingdom; the city got $40,000 for it.
The third leg took another decade. The South Mountain Freeway, 22 miles from the I-10 in Ahwatukee around to the I-10 in the West Valley, was the most contested freeway in Valley history: Ahwatukee stood to lose 120 homes, and the Gila River Indian Community, whose land the Pecos Road alignment borders, held a non-binding 2012 referendum in which “no build” won a plurality. The Federal Highway Administration gave final approval on March 10, 2015; the freeway opened December 21, 2019, and had been officially renamed for the late Congressman Ed Pastor two months earlier.
What it is not
Not the 101, which it meets twice, and not a loop in the strict sense; with the 101 it makes one, 61 miles plus 78, around most of the metro. And the Red Mountain Freeway does not go to Red Mountain, which sits on sovereign Community land with no public road to it.
The fine print
Wikipedia gives the length as 77.66 miles, with junctions at I-10 at both ends, Loop 101 twice, US 60 at the SuperRedTan interchange in Mesa, and State Routes 51, 87, 143 and 24. For Scottsdale the useful interchanges are three: Scottsdale Road, a single-point urban interchange just north of the Salt River where Rural Road becomes Scottsdale Road; the Pima/Price junction with the 101, which is where the Pima Freeway becomes the Price Freeway and where the two loops trade traffic badly at rush hour; and SR 143 and the Sky Harbor ramps to the airport. The stretch between the 101 and the 51 crosses the Salt River bed and passes Tempe Town Lake, the Papago buttes and Hole-in-the-Rock, which makes it the most scenic eight minutes of freeway in the Valley and the most distracted.
The South Mountain Freeway’s eastern segment runs along the Gila River Indian Community’s border and the western along 59th Avenue through Laveen; a shared-use path runs beside it between 40th Street and 17th Avenue because the old Pecos Road had been a cycling route. ADOT’s project page gives the length as 22 miles; the cost, a figure often reported in the billions, is not on the page we opened, so we leave it out.
For Scottsdale the 202’s real effect is indirect. Before the Red Mountain Freeway, the airport run went surface-street through Tempe or around by the 101 and I-10. Since the mid-1990s it has been one freeway, and the twenty-minute airport has done as much for the resort trade as any road except Scottsdale Road itself.