Dear tourist, welcome to Sedona in 2023. You may have noticed that traffic here is far, far, far worse than when you last visited.

Do not fret: We have you covered with our new Sedona transit system.

Chances are the bus doesn’t make stops near you unless you’re staying at a hotel or are within short walking distance of State Routes 89A or 179.

If you’re new to town and like most people, only plan­ning and spending the day or perhaps just one night, don’t worry, it’s easy to navigate.

If you’re staying at one of the Sedona area’s 2,500 to 3,000 short-term vacation rentals, then you’ll have to drive to a nearby bus stop because you’re very likely nowhere near a stop.

You can’t park in a hotel you’re not staying at or your car will get towed. So instead, you can drive down and park at our transit hub.

It would have made sense to put a hub at the edge of the city where it would be easy to reach and they’d be plenty of ample parking. Maybe on the west side as people come in from Cottonwood, eager to get into town and avoid the quagmire that is our narrow, two-lane State Route 179, or perhaps the southern entrance as drivers approach from the Village Oak Creek so we could get cars off the road quickly or even near the city parking lot in Uptown, where visitors from the Grand Canyon could find it easily.

We could have put it next to City Hall on land the city owns to keep it near city services so residents would be more likely to take it when coming to meetings or conducting business. We could have put it near one of our biggest parks, where tourists are already parking to hoof it a mile north to the Soldier Pass Trail and where they could enjoy the outdoor facilities, playgrounds, skate park, bike park or amphitheater we have to offer. We could have put it right next to a commercial area where they could enjoy some shopping or dining before or after their bus ride. We could have put it at a building the Sedona Chamber of Commerce gave to the city or at the new parking garage on Forest Road.

But no, we decided not to put it in any of these places. This is Sedona after all, where government leaders often do their best to make the worst possible decision and see how things play out.

It’s a fun game we play.

So instead, we built our traffic hub at the center of the worst traffic jam in our city, but not exactly there where it would at least be on the highway and easy to find, but rather on a residential street a bit to the west. If you’re bored waiting, you can trespass across two private hotel properties to reach a large commercial shopping complex.

To reach the hub, you can either sit on State Route 179 for about 25 minutes heading northbound, then drive through the worst intersection we have — the pedestrian crossing at Tlaquepaque — and then find it on a residen­tial street to the west.

If you’re coming from West Sedona, rather than go straight to the trailheads to the north, west or south of where you’re staying, instead, we’d like you to head due east right into the worst traffic jam of our city. Sometimes it backs up a full mile. Sometimes more. Take in all the sights of Cooks Hill on your 20- to 25-minute wait. Then turn right down for Brewer Road to the traffic hub itself.

Ignore the honking from all the neighbors trying to drive past you to get home — funny thing about that, this road you’re using is the only way in or out of this neighbor­hood. They have no other way out. Hope you don’t have a fender-bender and block them in.

If the buses are running late — and they will be thanks to the aforementioned traffic jams — you can wait on a parcel of land we promised to residents as a park but never actually built. It has some historic Ranger Station build­ings closed to the public, a few unbuilt Pickle ball courts and no playgrounds for kids, but it has … um … grass?

We made this promise to build a park a good 15 years ago and called it the “Heart of Sedona” because we enjoy sarcasm, but it’ll take us forever to follow through with that promise.

Remember that it took us nearly 20 years to build the Barbara Antonsen Memorial Park at Posse Grounds so by the time we finished it, there were very few residents who still remembered who Antonsen was or why she was important to our city. That’s how our leaders honor our heroes here in Sedona: Bureaucratic delays and institu­tional indifference.

Now, this transit hub is only supposed to be temporary until we move it 1,000 feet north, which alleviates nearly no problems except making it a bit easier to find, but our leaders have a funny way of making “temporary” things permanent, like the “temporary traffic” tax that became a “permanent transit” tax.

So enjoy our transit network. We built it in a rush.

Christopher Fox Graham

Managing Editor