The city of Sedona held an open house on its latest parking study at the Sedona Posse Grounds Hub on Thursday, Oct. 19. During the meeting, city staff announced they would be recommending that the proposed Uptown parking garage on Forest Road be resumed.

City Council placed the project on hold in October 2022 due in part to public opposition. City staff proposed conducting a reevaluation of the need for the garage during the council priority retreat in January and began that reevaluation process in March.

Feeling the Need

Sedona Assistant City Manager J. Andy Dickey told attendees that the results of the new parking study will be presented to the Sedona City Council on Wednesday, Nov. 15.

“Kimley-Horn’s analysis did conclude that new parking is needed,” Dickey said. “In fact, they found that in the next five to 10 years, we’re going to need somewhere between 70 to 320 new public parking spaces.”

The city task force formed to evaluate the need for the garage was composed of senior city staff, Kimley-Horn engineering consultants, two resident representatives and two business representatives. The representatives — but not the consultants — scored the six alternatives considered in the study, which included options to do nothing or to build a surface lot rather than a garage at the Forest Road site.

“The task force ultimately decided the best course of action is to proceed with the garage on the north side of Forest Road at the previously selected site,” Dickey said. “The task force was not unanimous … the two resident members did not agree with the conclusions of the study process and they do not support building a garage.”

While the garage is intended to expand parking, it will also result in additional reductions in parking over the long term, as the city intends to consolidate parking at the garage to facilitate transit operations.

“With that consolidation, that will allow us the flexibility to reduce some of that other parking, including street parking and other parking lots that are further into the residential areas,” Dickey said.

Walkable and Bikeable

Dickey said that the study process for the garage envisioned “tomorrow’s Uptown to be more walkable and bikeable.”

“We’ll get people to park because it’s viable, it’s proximate and it’s within walkable distance,” Dickey said when asked how building vehicle infrastructure would contribute to walkability and bikeability. “There’s studies out there that shows if you’re beyond a certain distance, it’s no longer walkable … Then we’re going to be building those street improvements, sidewalks, shared use paths … it makes it more usable for the walker or the biker.”

Regarding “car-free zones,” Dickey said “That’s a hard thing if we’re just talking about strictly car-free.

“If we do this in the right location in the right way, we’ll get people to use that, and what that will allow us to do is take some of those scattered parking areas throughout Uptown, that people are having to cycle through and create more friction and traffic, consolidate that to one area … That’s the best we can do with the infrastructure we have right now.”

Regarding a survey the city previously conducted on converting some Uptown streets to one-way only, Andrew Baird of Kimley-Horn said, “It’s definitely been considered,” but “it just has not been necessarily prioritized.”

“These roadways are necessary,” Baird said. “We’re always going to have cars.”

Environmental Engineering

One of the city’s displays showed the rankings the task force members gave to the various parking options considered in the study. In the category of preserving the environment, building no new parking received a weighted score of 1.67, while a surface lot at the Forest Road garage site scored 3, the Forest Road garage alone scored 4.44 and removing two public lots in addition to building the Forest Road garage received an environmental score of 5.

“The reason a lot of task force members arrived at a lower environmental score is almost entirely driven by the circulating traffic impact,” Jeremiah Simpson of Kimley-Horn said. Attendees had asked why the option involving no construction had received a worse environmental score than the option involving maximum construction.

“The idea of the amount of vehicle miles traveled that’s being added due to air pollution and things from the car from doing nothing is why that went to the bottom of our development criteria,” he said.

“Parking accounts for radiated heat,” Simpson said. “City centers run about two, two and a half degrees warmer than the surrounding natural farmland … They’re hotter than the surrounding areas, and that has to do with the amount of paved impervious surface … From a strictly environmental standpoint, a parking garage has a better impact, or a lower impact to the environment, than the same amount of parking lots.”

Regarding gravel lots, Simpson replied that that same consideration would not apply.

“I think from a water standpoint it’s probably much better to have something the water will go through,” Simpson said.

Pedestrians on 89A

“In an ideal world, pedestrians would cross above” State Route 89A, Baird said, when discussing the possibilities for bridging State Route 89A to reduce pedestrian interference with traffic flow.

“All I do is take that platform [at Wayside Chapel], put a pre-cast steel structure in, put an abutment bridge on the other side, drop down at Best Western, that’s it,” Baird said. “We’ve got that modeled. But there’s not a lot of pedestrian traffic up there, it’s too far north. Biggest benefit would be probably at Jordan … Right at Amara, we’ve got those businesses on the second story, just connect those and and drop it down.”

No Tourism Cuts

The study’s future parking needs forecast took into account several growth projections over the next decade, but only considered one possible scenario involving shrinking demand for parking, an estimated 7% over a 10-year period due to the expansion of the city’s transit program.

“Sedona’s population has dropped, but the people who are creating the demand for parking in Uptown are almost no residents whatsoever,” City Manager Karen Osburn said. “Eighty-five percent visitors … We don’t assume that our visitation is going to go down. Sedona is more and more popular over the years. So it’s really to serve visitors.”

The Sedona City Council set out its tourism management vision on March 29, which stated that the city’s primary goal with regard to tourism was to “manage tourism to limit traffic delays and parking issues to 2019 [pre-pandemic] levels.”

“We don’t think it’s realistic that we’re going to significantly decrease visitation from what we see now,” Osburn said. “We’re hoping from 2021, when it was the peak, and we were so oversubscribed.”