The last few weeks have been some of the worst in Sedona traffic congestion history, with eastbound delays on State Route 89A backed up to Airport Road or further — even on weekdays — and delays of 20 to 40 minutes on State Route 179 day after day after day.

Sedona’s current elected leaders can be expected to say, almost to a person, that these delays are due solely because of rolling spring break, which begins in late February in some places, runs through March into early April, bringing families from around the Southwest and the country into Arizona for a week or weekend clogging up our roads before they dissipate in April.

Council’s advice: “It’s seasonal.” “It’s not that big of a problem.”

So it’s seasonal and it’s predictable, but city leaders put zero effort into alleviating it? It’s been happening every spring for at least 20 years.

We know that in March and April the roads would be clogged, so why on Earth are we content with roads that are perfectly fine 10 months of the year, but are absolute garbage for two?

You would not work a job where, for seven hours, every­thing was perfectly fine but for one hour a day the building was on fire and chainsaw-wielding maniacs stalk you, your colleagues and co-workers.

For our elderly population, these backups are rolling death traps because people who might suffer a medical emergency have to wait for an ambulance to get though and then make it to a hospital.

Council’s advice: “Don’t suffer a heart attack or stroke during rush hour.”

That’s insane. That is no way to run a government. And yet, this is how Sedona City Councils have been running our traffic plan for 20-plus years.

Five-and-a-half years ago, in November of 2015, we produced a two-page spread called, “A Comprehensive List of Potential Improvements to Fix Sedona Traffic.” It’s our on website. Download it. Print it. Share it.

One council member, who has now left, asked for extra copies and would routinely pull it out during council meet­ings when discussing how to fix traffic problems.

Council, to their credit, did some of the things that we suggested:

• Widened southbound State Route 89A in Uptown to two lanes
• Put in a center median
• Put in a detour from southbound State Route 89A leaving Oak Creek Canyon to the city parking lot, now called Owenby Way
• And building a parking garage near where we suggested it.

The city is also apparently building a connection from Forest Road to State Route 89A west of the U.S. Post Office, although for some reason it is still in the design phase instead of being under construction.

But the two biggest problems which council has not addressed in its Sedona in Motion traffic plan and for which no council members appear to ever want to address, is the fact the State Route 89A is a bottleneck coming around Cooks Hill between Airport Road and the Ranger Road roundabout.

There are no alternate routes, paths, roads, detours, dirt paths, tunnels, bridges, wormholes or space portals between these two points in the area to get from west to east except State Route 89A. We have pressed Sedona City Council members and mayors to alleviate this problem with either a connection across Soldier Wash from Uptown to Soldier Pass Road — a scenic route with bike lanes would be lovely — or a connection between the Brewer Road area to Airport Road, to no avail.

The other major problem ignored by council after council is the miles-long delay along State Route 179 from the Village of Oak Creek to Ranger Road. The highway is a two-lane road: One north, one south. Considering the traffic flow just among residents, this is absurd.

There are 20 residential roads that are peninsulas off the highway with no other outlet nor connection to other neighborhoods and only three with more than once connection.

In the 1990s the Arizona Department of Transportation told Sedona it had a plan to widen the highway to four lanes with two lanes in both directions. But Keep Sedona Beautiful and its political arm, Voice of Choice for 179, fought against this expansion by co-opting the public process and bumrushing the public forums to falsely tell ADOT that Sedona residents did not want this. The fact is most residents did not care what the road looked like as long as it was wider.

KSB and Voice of Choice misled their own members into believing that if ADOT did not widen the road then tourists simply would not take it. Perhaps that would be the case if there was any other alternate route at all, but there was and is none, period. So all those tourists have been coming up that road for 20 years and residents have suffered. Arizona’s population has swelled from 4.8 million to 7.2 million since then and the number of tourists has only increased.

Council appears to be on a 20-year spring break to ignore the problem. It won’t fix itself.

Christopher Fox Graham

Managing Editor

Editor’s Note:

We did not include Forest Road Connection on our comprehensive map in November 2015 and apparently I omitted it for no good reason other than complete oversight.

The irony of that is that every day I stare across my desk in our newsroom at a 1993 map created by Design Group Architects of the then-proposed but now-defunct Oak Creek Creekwalk. Here’s the view from my desk of the map that shows the route at the top:

We discussed that specific route numerous times in the years before we created our map but for some inexplicable reason, I did not include it. We give the city credit for building the road we forgot to include.