Judith D. Meyer is president of the Tucson Mountains Association.

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Bus-depot plan for NW Side makes no sense

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I am writing on behalf of the Tucson Mountains Association about the city's proposal to move the Greyhound bus terminal to a location west of Interstate 10 on West El Camino del Cerro. It would be difficult to find a worse location for added bus traffic.

Traffic headed in either direction on El Camino del Cerro must go under the freeway through a concrete tunnel so narrow it can accommodate only very limited traffic. The middle lane is divided into two back-to-back left-turn lanes, already heavily overburdened. The left-turn lanes are so short that a bus might have difficulty even getting into one, and the tail of a bus waiting to turn left onto the freeway toward Phoenix would almost certainly block the one narrow lane remaining for through traffic.

The bottleneck at that tunnel is immensely magnified because there is a railroad crossing beyond the freeway to the east. When trains travel through, traffic is backed up for half a mile or more. No vehicle can even get to the left-turn lane under the archway, sometimes for several stoplight cycles, after a train has passed. Backed-up traffic traveling straight ahead is tying up the single lane that leads to it.

Gridlock not only makes that intersection dangerous, as drivers use foolish strategies to bypass standing traffic, but it also sometimes backs up the freeway exits dangerously. As work proceeds on the freeway project southeast of the intersection towards Tucson, more traffic than ever is entering or exiting the freeway at this hazardous and aggravating intersection.

The Regional Transportation Authority Plan includes an overpass for both the railroad and the interstate at that intersection, but that work is not slated to begin until at least 2017 under current projections. That, of course, depends upon the unlikely event that sales tax revenues meet earlier projections, despite the slowing economy.

According to a March 10 article in the Star, Ellie Towne of the Flowing Wells Neighborhood Association indicated this would not affect residents of her neighborhood. Generally, Flowing Wells residents do not need to cross the freeway to go to work or school, find necessary services or get to central Tucson. It is the residents of the neighborhoods west of that intersection who would be affected.

The Tucson Mountains Association is the neighborhood association for the residents whose daily lives would be affected. El Camino del Cerro is the only crossing available for seven miles north and south of it, and thousands of residents depend upon this woefully inadequate corridor. Those who rely on buses to travel to and from Tucson would be ill-served by this plan. There is no hub of transportation nearby to get them to and from their Tucson destinations. The city said the terminal would be "in the same neighborhood" as the Prince Road Sun Tran maintenance facility. In fact, that facility is several miles away, with no pedestrian pathway, so we cannot see how that would help.