After the early December cold snap turned much of the city’s commercial areas into ghost towns, the typical pre-Christmas shopping rush brought customers and diners to local shops and restaurants.

While the increase in visitors means our businesses stay open, ensuring that many residents stay employed, commensurate with the influx of pedestrians are the vehicles that brought them, clogging our roads.

The “Y” intersection used to refer just to the stoplight intersection at the junction of State Routes 89A and 179. Now looking at live traffic maps on Google and Bing as the traffic situation worsens every afternoon, the red “heavy traffic” indicator has spread a Y-shaped virus up Cook’s Hill to Airport Road, up Oak Creek Canyon to Grasshopper Point and down State Route 179 to at least the Gallery District, if not Poco Diablo, sometimes as far the Ranger Station south of the entire Village of Oak Creek.

This week, we overheard on our scanner Sedona police officers doing their best to keep traffic moving, but also heard the frustration in their voices. Remember that chocolate factory scene from “I Love Lucy”? While that’s what the traffic problem is like when viewed from a computer, when we’re on the road, it feels a whole lot more like the Philadelphia zombie attack scene from “World War Z.”

Listening to the police scanner or seeing photos posted by residents on social media is masochistic schadenfreude reflecting the same struggle the rest of us experience: Pedestrians crossing at Tlaquepaque, drivers hunting for parking along State Route 89A, jaywalkers in Uptown and the simple fact of visitors and residents all choose to pass through our city at roughly the same time every day and every weekend.

The online traffic survey conducted in October and November by Kimley-Horn gathered 3,300 visitors, 2,200 of whom voted and wrote comments. Topping the list of suggestions was “more roads.” Based on written comments, residents want more connector routes allowing drivers’ deviations to avoid high-traffic areas especially when there is no need to drive through them.
Currently there are no alternate routes for our busiest intersection. If coming from Tucson or just Back O’Beyond and heading to either Coffee Pot Drive or Oak Creek Canyon, every driver must pass through the “Y” or roundabout at Ranger Road, sometimes both.

Truthfully, the problem is not as massive as hours-long traffic backups in major cities when compared to scale, but it’s frustrating because it’s always the same stretch of road and always the same time of day or the week. I am uncertain about the antiseptic civil engineering term, but if indeed insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results, then in the parlance of our times, that’s insane.

The survey is just one aspect of the study that should be completed in May. Hopefully the suggestions will include smart ideas for alternate routes to alleviate the pressure on the ever-growing Y virus and give drivers options to get across town without ever having to pass through the city’s biggest clog. We will also need to pressure not just Sedona City Council but also the far wealthier Arizona Department of Transportation and Yavapai and Coconino counties for the funds to build these additional alternate routes.