Sedona’s traffic delays on Wednesday, March 16, were some of the worst in the city’s history that didn’t involve a fatal accident or collision on Cooks Hill.
Traffic northbound on State Route 179 was backed up to the Chapel area with a delay of about 30 minutes, while traffic eastbound on State Route 89A was backed up for 40 minutes, starting at Tlaquepaque, sneaking through the Y roundabout, and past Cooks Hill to Airport Road far into in West Sedona all the way to Andante Drive.
The locally known back roads on the north side and south side of State Route 89A were also heavily trafficked.
While local leaders attribute this perennial gridlock to “spring break” as though it is an iconic unkillable villain like Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees or Freddy Krueger and throw up their hands as if there is nothing to be done, there most certainly can be if officials would be willing to risk some political capital.
In our Facebook post warning drivers about the delays and urging them to file complaints with both Sedona City Council members and the Arizona Department of Transportation, readers proposed numerous potential fixes to the traffic problems, many of which we had also proposed earlier in our “Comprehensive List of Potential Improvements to Fix Sedona Traffic” published on Nov. 6, 2015:
Chief among these will be widening State Route 179 from the Village of Oak Creek to the Y roundabout to four lanes as the Arizona Department of Transportation had proposed back in 2005.
Naysayers erroneously claim that widening doesn’t fix the bottleneck when it becomes two lanes at Tlaquepaque, nor deal with the pedestrian crossing. Like the professional traffic engineers we interview, our suggestions are unsentimental. ADOT’s plan didn’t allow that bottleneck, nor did we suggest to keep it, nor should it be something residents want to keep for nostalgia’s sake, “Remember, kids, the great traffic jam of March 2019? We waited for hours behind that Nissan Altima from Ohio ….”
Rather, we suggested what ADOT planned: “Eventually widen SR 89A and 179 from two lanes to four lanes from Uptown to Interstate 17 as ADOT has planned to do since the 1970s.” Removing the two-lane bottleneck and having four lanes from the Village of Oak Creek to the Y is key.
For those who opine that widening State Route 179 fixes nothing but can’t provide any substantiation, let us counter with this: Southbound State Route 89A through Uptown used to back up to Midgley Bridge. The city widened the southbound roads from Owenby Way to Forest Road and we haven’t had a southbound delay since. More lanes and alternate routes to avoid congested areas work.
City officials say a pedestrian crossing under the State Route 179 bridge over Oak Creek might be remedied at some point by a pedestrian underpass, but planning for a mere sidewalk has taken years.
The other fix would be more connections between Uptown, West Sedona and the State Route 179 area, either a connection from the Church of Latter-Day Saints to the Rolling Hills neighborhood, a road that wraps around Airport Road, a bridge that connects State Route 179 with the Brewer Road area, an alternate route with bridge downstream from Red Rock Crossing or a road from the north end of Uptown to Soldier Pass Road using one of the former dirt roads that once existed when Sedona was still small and unincorporated.
Yes, there were back roads from Uptown to Soldier Pass before growth and new homes blocked off the access. These unpaved dirt roads have since been reclaimed by 40 years of forest growth and appear to most users to be merely really wide hiking trails, but they are still wide enough for vehicles. They could be again if Sedona and U.S. Forest Service officials could work together to build a simple, pretty connection between the two neighborhoods, and one with no turnoffs for hikers to clog up. As a scenic bypass, locals in a pinch could use it to get from east to west without having to drive on State Route 89A.
The bottleneck on Cooks Hill means anyone in the west Verde Valley driving to Flagstaff or the Village of Oak Creek, Uptown or Schnebly Hill Road are funneled nearly a half-mile through the same two lanes. If 50,000 people are trying to head from Sedona to the VOC and you’re the only one going to Flagstaff, you’re stuck with 50,000 other people for a half-mile. This is absurd.
The Sedona in Motion program accomplished its big goals early, but the program is now just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. We need a new plan to adapt to the problems that remain, which buses and signage won’t fix.
Voters, 2022 is an election year and you should demand candidates directly address traffic problems. In the narrow scope of city management, anything outside city limits is a waste of time and resources when city leaders need to address this very clear problem inside our city that affects how we shop, get medical treatment, drive to work, whether to take our kids to a park or navigate to our homes.
Christopher Fox Graham
Managing Editor
