Most local politics — potholes, planning commissions, honoring individual citizens — can feel mundane, especially when compared to the Unholy Orgy of Clowns and Ignorance happening back east. However, some important issues still need to be addressed. The town of Marana is grappling with a local mess that resembles the Quintic, a legendary math problem that great thinkers over the centuries attempted to solve until it was ultimately proven that it couldn’t be solved.
It’s like that scene in “Apollo 13” when the carbon dioxide levels in the damaged spacecraft rise to dangerous heights and the people back on Earth need to devise a makeshift solution using spare parts and duct tape. Well, there’s no steely-eyed missile man to be found in this situation, so things are only going to get worse. There won’t be a Trans-Island Skyway (an obscure Donald Fagen reference), so they will have to keep moving vehicles around on the existing surface streets. It’s already incredibly dangerous, and sometime this year, it’s going to get exponentially worse.
Hundreds of new apartments have been built in the area just south of the Target store on Ina. When those things are fully occupied, chaos will reign.
I remember how the movers and shakers all winked and nodded when the town of Marana pulled off the Heist of the Century, annexing all of the businesses in the Ina-Thornydale area and leaving all of the adjacent residential areas to Pima County. Monster tax revenues with almost no responsibility was the consensus; genius, really. Well, the annexing chickens have come home to roost.
You have to feel for the Marana traffic engineers. They have inherited a situation to which the only solutions are either impossible or no-damn-way! Like their counterparts everywhere, they start their jobs knowing that almost all drivers are either incompetent, rude, impaired, selfish, distracted or any number of combinations thereof. The engineers have to know that many drivers are going to do dangerous things just to save a minute or two of travel time. The drivers on the stretch of Ina between Oldfather and Thornydale are demonstrably among the worst in Tucson and it’s only a hint of what is to come.
I’ve had the occasion to travel that route (east on Ina) a few times in recent weeks and I’m stunned at how horrible (and potentially lethal) many drivers are. Start at the T-intersection of Oldfather and Ina. You head east and the first thing you come to is the Bisbee Breakfast Club on a small street that opens out onto Ina. Thankfully, it’s impossible to turn left because of a median, but daredevils loved to squeal across two lanes of traffic to get into a left turn lane, perchance to do an unwise U-turn and cut in front of westbound traffic.
That’s really nothing compared to what is to come. Next come Aerie Street. For years, it was a little-known and little-used way to get to some small condos south of Ina and a semi-secret way to completely avoid the Ina-Thornydale intersection. You could turn south onto Aerie, follow it as it turned east behind the Target and come out on Thornydale, south of the eegee’s. When the aforementioned apartments open, sleepy Aerie is going to become the Indianapolis Speedway. The amount of new traffic spilling onto southbound Thornydale will be significant, but the bigger problem will be the people trying to get onto Ina in hopes of heading west.
There will be screams and the gnashing of teeth for Marana to install a traffic light there, but for a variety of reasons (many of which involve an actual, unintended imposition of gridlock), that probably won’t happen.
The worst is yet to come. There’s an unnamed street that empties out onto Ina right near the Chick-fil-A, carrying traffic from the Target and several other stores. Most unfortunately, it’s possible to make a left turn onto westbound Ina through an opening in the median. Of course, it’s probably only safe to make that turn between the hours of 3 a.m. and 3:15 a.m. — and not on the weekends. But really bad drivers try to do it all day long.
One time, two dumbass drivers heading east stopped to let traffic come out of there. Three straight giant pickups ran the Stop sign, barreled onto the street, and screeched to a halt when the first one couldn’t find a break in the westbound traffic. For more than two minutes, they formed a perpendicular barrier to eastbound traffic. I could only imagine how far backed up the traffic was. There was probably some guy sitting in his car back by I-10 cursing our ancestors and progeny.
We should feel bad for the people who get stuck there trying to get out onto Ina the first time. Forgive them, for they knew not what they were getting into. But you just know that there are people who endanger other people’s lives on a regular basis by trying to make that ridiculous left turn. If there were such a thing as a traffic cop’s quota (wink, wink), it could be filled in a two-hour period on a Thursday.
I’ve mentioned this quagmire to my daughter, who is an Ivy League-educated civil engineer. She smiled knowingly when I muttered, “The Quintic…”
