The Sedona City Council held a special meeting on Oct. 12 to receive progress reports from city staff on the Sedona in Motion program and discuss its future evolution.
Parking Garage
In response to public criticism, the council voted to put development of the Uptown parking garage on hold to study the idea further. Outgoing Mayor Sandy Moriarty opposed the decision, saying she would like to see the project move forward.
Transit Hub & Ranger Road
City Director of Public Works Andy Dickey delivered a presentation on design updates to the Ranger Road extension and the RIDE Park transit hub planned for construction west of the extension. Dickey noted that the design for the extension is 30% complete, with completion expected in nine to 12 months, and that the design for the roundabout that will replace the present Ranger and Brewer Road intersection is 60% complete and should be finished in six months.
When completed three years from now, the extended Ranger Road will connect to State Route 89A and the projected Forest Road extension at a new roundabout, while the present roundabout at 89A and Brewer will become a Tintersection allowing only right-in, right-out access between Brewer and the highway.
“I really liked the idea that we were going to eliminate that roundabout and I’m having trouble understanding why we’re not,” Councilwoman Holli Ploog commented.
Dickey explained that preserving access to Brewer will be convenient for residents who live along the road. “There will be some friction there still, but by adding these additional elements it’ll help that merging movement occur more efficiently,” he said.
Council members also expressed dissatisfaction with the name of RIDE Park, arguing that it will be misleading.
“You put that on a sign on the road, people will think they could park there,” Vice Mayor Scott Jablow said.
RIDE Park will include a total of five parking spaces for cars.
“If you want to get there by car, you have to park at the garage,” Dickey said. Although the design concept for the hub calls for it to offer multi-modal transport, this refers to walking, cycling, and shuttles or public transit — not cars.
“I don’t think the acronym is going to stick with anybody,” Councilman Tom Lamkin said. He suggested the hub be named after a founding father or mother.
After considering alternatives such as “Exchange Park” and “Ride Rock,” as well as a proposal from Jablow and Ploog to invite public suggestions on the name, the council settled on renaming it “Ride Exchange” for the moment.
Sedona Shuttle
Following discussion of the Uptown garage, the council also heard from city Transit Manager Robert Weber, who presented the latest ridership numbers for the city’s trailhead shuttle service.
Weber stated that the shuttles have seen a total of about 150,000 passenger boardings in the 222 days since service began. After falling to roughly 700 boardings per day in June and July, usage has risen to around 1,500 boardings per day in October.
Weber estimated that the shuttles would see approximately 268,000 boardings in 2023. He compared this figure to that for the city of Show Low, which reportedly has Arizona’s most successful rural transit system and saw just over 180,000 passenger boardings in 2018. However, Weber then claimed that this projection would represent a 235% increase over the number for Show Low, rather than the 49% difference it actually represents.
“Is Show Low a transit system that’s public for people as circulators? That’s not just the trailheads?” Lamkin asked.
“That’s the entire city for everybody,” Weber confirmed.
“If we were doing it citywide on a circulation basis … it would probably be much different. Much higher,” Lamkin said.
According to the Sedona Transportation Master Plan, Sedona receives 2.8 million annual visitors, or over 7,600 visitors per day. Since each passenger who rides the shuttle to and from a trailhead is counted as boarding twice, 1,500 round-trip boardings per day works out to less than 1 in 10 Sedona visitors who are using the shuttle.
“They want to see these numbers because they can’t believe them” Weber said of his transit counterparts in Flagstaff, telling the council that route 14 was seeing 68 boardings per hour.
Those numbers raise questions. At 100% capacity, the highest rate of boardings the number 14 shuttle can achieve is 48 per hour. On the afternoon of Sunday, Oct. 16, it was averaging 25 boardings per hour, while the number 11 shuttle to the Dry Creek trailhead was averaging seven boardings per hour at one point.
Weber was also candid about the city’s intentions for the shuttle service when he described how placing boulders along Dry Creek Road to eliminate public parking was pushing shuttle traffic up.
“I’m encouraging the Forest Service and the [Yavapai] County to continue to work towards getting those parking restrictions in for the rest of Dry Creek — the county area — in time for spring break,” Weber said. “If we get excited and start doing that kind of thing — ’cause there’s still significant public safety issues out there … we’d probably have to add an additional bus on this line.”
The city’s transit manager and Councilwoman Jessica Williamson discussed the idea of closing Boynton Canyon Road to parking as well. The county-owned road is 2.5 miles outside Sedona city limits.
“They weren’t deployed, really, to help traffic,” Weber said of the shuttles, noting that Sedonans have frequently complained that the shuttles do nothing to reduce congestion. Instead, he said, “they were deployed at the request of the citizens … to deal with these public safety issues and return some of these neighborhoods to some semblance of normalcy, and I think they did that, and that’s what they were designed to do.”
The shuttle service was supported by the members of the Shadow Estates and Back o’ Beyond homeowners’ associations, which adjoin the Soldier Pass and Cathedral Rock trailheads, respectively.
Back o’ Beyond resident Dave Marfield complained that having tourists “scrambling to find parking” along the road left him and his neighbors “feeling claustrophobic and trapped and in danger.”
“All neighbors I’ve heard back from have been enthusiastically in favor of the city’s plan, but only when the plan includes closing the parking lots and making them accessible by shuttle only,” Marfield said in 2021. Soldier Pass resident Danny Carter referred to the “detrimental consequences of letting the tourists roam and hang out in the neighborhood.”
A range of similar comments submitted to City Council by their neighbors reveals consistent opposition on the part of these residents to allowing hikers to walk or park along the streets where they live.
Lamkin pointed out that based on 268,000 riders and an estimated $4 million budget for next year, the cost of running the shuttle would be about “$15 per ridership” were it being run as a self-sufficient system. As many visitors board the shuttle twice, the actual cost per passenger is likely double that.
“I’ve never run across a public transit system that’s been self-sufficient,” Weber said in response.
