Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, the city of Sedona creeps in this petty pace from day to day, year to year, to the last syllable of recorded time. All our yesterdays have lighted fools’ hopes to fix traffic to dusty death. Out, out, brief hope!
Sedona residents from multimillion-dollar property owners to business owners to working-class renters to elementary students to the family dog know that Sedona’s No. 1 traffic choke point is the pedestrian crossing at Tlaquepaque.
When the northern commercial parcel was just some small businesses with no tangible connection to Tlaquepaque, other than proximity, there was little pedestrian crossover between the southern and northern properties.
Rather than flat-out prohibit pedestrians from crossing from north to south with a fence — pretty, chainlink, electrified or otherwise — the city installed a crossing. No West Sedona business nor neighborhood gets this gentle coddling. No, residents there have to walk a ½ mile or more to a crosswalk, but luckily at this choke point, tourists matter more than drivers or residents trying to walk to a grocery store.
With the Sedona In Motion project — a name that becomes a more ironic use of “motion” every year — we hoped the city would finally nix the pedestrian crossing and build a way for tourists to cross from the two properties without slowing down drivers.
With a bridge physically difficult and a lighted intersection impractical, the city opted for a pedestrian underpass.
Pedestrians would walk several hundred feet east, cross under State Route 179 while looking at Oak Creek under the bridge then emerge on the other side and walk several hundred feet down to re-enter the opposite to Tlaquepaque. Not ideal, but workable.
Yet a good idea is but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets its hour upon the stage, is ruined by Sedona City Council and then is heard no more.
Now the city is still going to build the multimillion dollar underpass, but could keep that pedestrian crossing in place.
“Surely the city can’t be that stupid,” you might be saying to yourself. Yet, it is. Sedona In Motion is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, accomplishing nothing.
Yet again a tiny handful of squeaky wheels are terrifying Sedona City Council, which once again immediately caves under pressure.
Tourists visiting our town for a day, perhaps only one day in their entire life, do not think to themselves, “Well, I shouldn’t cross here, instead, knowing that the city of Sedona suffers tremendous traffic problems and despite this existing crosswalk before me, I should instead walk several hundred feet to the east, cross under the road then several hundred yards back.”
We’ve all been tourists and when we are, we are dumb. We park where we shouldn’t, we walk where we shouldn’t, we take beelines instead of proper paths, which is why when we are on vacation the places we go have extensive signage, barriers, fences, queues, ropes, tickets, paths, docents and rangers to direct us where we should go and where we should stay away.
The city of Sedona is hoping for smarter visitors. If they existed, we could find parking at Devil’s Bridge.
All it takes is one tourist to decide “I’m going that way” for the crowd to then follow. We had the same problem, several months ago, when one tourist saw a hole in the fence at the Chapel the Holy Cross, made their way through and several hundred followed, resulting in several dozen people being trespassed from the closed property.
The city is trusting these people to choose underpass over crosswalk? Good luck.
The character of Macbeth was a terrible judge of human behavior, but as a traffic engineer, at least he got Birnam Wood to move to Dunsinane.
The city should make the pedestrian crosswalk a mere memory hidden deep in the dark recesses of tourist legend, discoverable only by an epic Lord-of-the-Rings-style quest to an island on the planet Ahch-To.
The city should build an anti-jaywalking fence similar to the one Uptown but less ugly, and force all tourists to use the pedestrian underpass.
If we’re going to spend millions of taxpayer dollars to build the thing, make it worth every penny. If the city is going to let the pedestrian crossing remain, don’t build the underpass. Use those millions of dollars to build some affordable housing and at least put the money to any use rather than paying a Phoenix construction firm to build something transients and graffiti artists will use. Clearly this is what happens when city staff can’t afford to live in their city. They aren’t affected by bad traffic on busy weekends, so deciding to throw money at a dumb project that doesn’t matter personally makes it look like they’re doing something while council applauds and pretends Sedona In Empty Motions moves cars. With an inept council directing them, we can expect more fruitless waste of tax dollars until 2022.
Christopher Fox Graham
Managing Editor
