Well, we can’t say we didn’t have any warning. For months now, we’ve heard a lot about what consulting firm HDR won’t be telling Scottsdale to do in its long-awaited traffic study, being released in chunks for city officials and the public to review.
Officials say it won’t make a recommendation for or against extending a light rail line up Scottsdale Road — even though, or possibly because, the firm is involved in planning the current line. It won’t make a recommendation to widen Chaparral Road through the Villa Monterrey neighborhood, or if it did it wouldn’t make any difference, since the City Council has already decided not to do that.
Perhaps out of sheer frustration, HDR has turned in a draft report on downtown traffic circulation remarkably that recommends the fewest, least costly recommendations imaginable for a city which has been trying for years to figure out how to unclog the city’s arterial streets and freeways.
HDR projects a 30 percent increase in vehicles per day between now and 2030, but maintains nothing major needs to be done to accommodate those vehicles. Try convincing anyone who uses the Loop 101 on a regular basis of that.
The study strongly endorses the turn lanes being added to Indian School Road — which were approved by voters seven years ago. It advises the council that widening Thomas Road between Civic Center Boulevard and Pima Road through established neighborhoods is “potentially costly.”
Without offering any head counts, it pushes for more pedestrian and bicycle-friendly corridors throughout the study area. As private enterprise pushes ahead with transforming downtown Scottsdale into a nearly unrecognizable entertainment and residential district, with soaring condo towers taking place of that plywood cowboy as its chief symbol, HDR and the council continue to pretend these changes aren’t that drastic.
The report suggests a few left-turn arrows, wider bike lanes and sidewalks will be sufficient to handle the congestion that comes with higher-density urban living. And that may be possible, particularly with more masstransit options.
But HDR mentions the idea of “high-capacity transit” without detailing how it would tie into the rest of the transportation grid. That will be handled in a separate part of this report. Which probably won’t be making a recommendation on whether light rail, modern streetcar or bus rapid transit would be best for Scottsdale Road.
It’s kind of the anti-Harry Potter; we think we know exactly how it’s going to end when the final report is submitted, expected to the city by the end of the year.
And there we’ll have it in 2030: “Scottsdale and the Hairy Commute.”
East Valley Tribune
