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Arizona needs to move aggressively to create a commuter rail line between Tucson and Phoenix and to beef up mass transit throughout the state.

The sooner we build these transportation improvements, the better.

In January, Gov. Janet Napolitano advanced the issue by ordering the Arizona Department of Transportation, or ADOT, to give her a report on the best potential rail projects for Arizona along with details about how to pay for them.

That report is due the middle of next month.

A great deal about the state's future and its transportation needs is already known, even before the ADOT report is written.

For example, Arizona's population is not going to shrink. It will grow considerably.

In the next 30 or 40 years, areas that are now "wide open spaces" will become urbanized.

"Uninterrupted development" from Sierra Vista to Prescott Valley, predicted David Taylor, technical services coordinator for the Pima Association of Governments. Taylor made his prediction a couple of weeks ago from the stage of the Fox Theatre during a seminar sponsored by the Pima County Real Estate Research Council.

Behind him on the stage was a huge map showing the path of urbanization, a ragged diagonal all the way from Sierra Vista in the southeast to Prescott, 100 miles northwest of Phoenix in Central Arizona.

That is Arizona's future, Taylor said. Anybody who thinks existing roads or the internal combustion engine can satisfy the transportation needs of that major change is mistaken.

We will need other ways to travel between cities, especially between Tucson and Phoenix. Most of the state's major employers are in the Phoenix area, which also attracts national headquarters of large corporations.

As the economic and governmental capital of Arizona, the Phoenix area will continue to generate employment opportunities, and we expect more Tucson residents to be commuting 120 miles to jobs in Maricopa County.

As Taylor told the real estate group Feb. 27, our future "is a case of the past as prologue." Our climate has managed to attract a state population that now stands at 6.2 million. The Tucson region passed the 1 million mark this winter — a number hard to imagine 35 years ago.

And Taylor says this trend is not about to end. We live in a "sun corridor" that stretches from Southern Arizona to Las Vegas. It's a corridor that has lured cold and chilly outlanders for decades, and it is our future, he said.

We agree, which is why we think it is essential for Arizona to get moving with plans for a modern transportation system that includes a high-speed commuter rail line between Tucson and Phoenix, light-rail systems for intracity transportation, modern electric streetcars and energy-efficient buses.

These innovations will be extremely expensive and cannot be done without assistance from the federal government. The federal transportation bureaucracy tends to move slowly unless encouraged to do otherwise by influential members of a state's congressional delegation.

We look for strong advocacy, especially from Sens. John McCain and Jon Kyl, who have risen to positions of prominence in both the Republican Party and the Senate. Aggressive advocacy is essential to meet the growth needs of Arizona, and we look to our governor and our delegation in Washington to exert leadership in this area.