What happened to Joe's crosswalk?
New policies, new problems.
In midtown Tucson, a thick strip of black paint covers what used to be a crosswalk connecting two popular strip malls along East Broadway Boulevard at Belvedere Avenue.
There are crosswalks at the nearby intersections down the street, but you can’t see them from where the blotted-out crosswalk once stood.
A safe place to cross the street near the former Belvedere crosswalk is roughly a quarter-mile away.
The city’s transportation department also painted over another nearby crosswalk – on Broadway at Mountain View Drive – but at least there is a newer, upgraded crossing with a dedicated signal to stop traffic a block away.
The deleted crosswalks are a minor, almost unnoticeable, casualty of two of Tucson’s competing goals: building vibrant walkable communities along business corridors and improving traffic flow along a popular cross-town thoroughfare.
A traffic count at a nearby intersection suggests that 12,000 cars pass through the area every weekday.
So what?
Well, the Tucson City Council on Tuesday night adopted a new set of priorities that are clearly going to clash with the political reality of Tucson’s reliance on cars as their main form of transportation.
But to do that, the city is going to have to make the city more pedestrian-friendly by building more crosswalks.
Also, the crosswalk was right near Joe’s house and he used it regularly until the city recently erased it. He still sees pedestrians use it every day.1
The Community Corridors Tool (CCT) program that council members adopted this week is designed to encourage developers to turn empty storefronts into thriving mixed-used developments.
Basically, city officials want to make Tucson more walkable, as well as make it easier to redevelop properties and turn them into affordable housing than it is to put in another car wash right now.
With the passage of the CCT, the city is offering developers incentives to encourage infill redevelopment, including reducing minimum parking space requirements and increasing the building height limits.
On the southwest corner of Rosemont and Broadway boulevards, about a half-mile away from where city officials removed the crosswalk on Belvedere, sits a seven-acre empty lot.
It happens to be an "opportunity spot” that the city uses as an example of what developers could build on an empty lot under the new CCT guidelines.
What they came up with was a four-story apartment complex along Broadway, with smaller residential structures behind it backing into the established neighborhood.
As part of the CCT, the city offers an affordable housing incentive to developers who set aside 15% of the units for families making 80% of the median income or less.
Tucson needs an additional 8,000 affordable housing units to meet existing demand, according to the latest estimate, although the CCT ordinance is far more likely to encourage building apartments than homes or condos.
City officials are hoping the CCT will encourage developers to take another look at redeveloping underused, or even empty, buildings and turning at least some of them into housing.
But for this program to be successful, Tucson will have to build more crosswalks – not less.
Koren Manning, the interim director of the city's planning and development services department, told the Council on Tuesday night that the new program will make it easier to build an apartment complex on an empty lot than it is to build a car wash.
“The goals of this proposal are to remove barriers to attainable housing, promote transit-oriented infill development to support climate action goals, update our zoning to make it easier to permit the full spectrum of housing types and simplify the redevelopment of underutilized sites,” she said.
The CCT is the product of several years of discussion among the Council about various infill incentives, prolonged engagement with city residents and analysis of opportunities for corridor redevelopment in Tucson.
Public comment on Tuesday night was largely positive, primarily from affordable housing advocates and locals with backgrounds in urban planning.
Local architect Corky Poster, for example, urged the Council to pass the CCR, saying it needed to do more to encourage the building of affordable housing.
“Because (building affordable housing) is difficult, the success or failure of a development really occurs at the margins,” he said. “And as a result, small things, particularly when we don't have much money to support housing, small regulatory adjustments make a very big difference in how we are able to be successful in housing.”
Daniel Bursick, a planner with the city's planning and development services department, said the CCT is an extension of other policies the city has adopted, but he concedes that some policies conflict with each other.
A 2014 policy requires that the city must review any marked crosswalks when performing road repairs nearby, said Erica Frazelle, the public information officer for the city’s Department of Transportation and Mobility.
“Studies have shown that under certain traffic conditions (traffic speed, volume and number of lanes) a marked crosswalk alone has a vehicle/pedestrian crash rate nearly five times that of a location with no markings at all,” she wrote in an email to the Tucson Agenda, “Since it was determined that those conditions (traffic speed, volume and number of lanes) exist at this location it should be removed.”
Google Street View images from 2015 show the white lines marking the crosswalks had been removed, but two pedestrian signs facing east on Broadway remained in the Belvedere intersection.
Those same signs remained up until at least July 2024, the last Google street view image of the intersection.
The city recently removed the signs, as well as painted over the intersection, after the asphalt material used for the overlay for Broadway Boulevard back in 2015 had degraded to the point that the old white crosswalk was visible to cars and pedestrians.
City traffic engineers remain convinced the intersections are poor candidates for marked crosswalks.
“The Department of Transportation and Mobility still believes that the crosswalks should not exist at these locations (without a Pedestrian Hybrid Beacon aka HAWK),” wrote Frazelle.
Still, Bursick is optimistic that as the city continues to revisit its long-term vision for the community, conflicting policies will be revisited – including when and where to put in pedestrian crossings.
There are some reasons to be optimistic that the city has begun to re-evaluate its priorities when it comes to the battle between vehicle traffic and pedestrian safety.
A road diet shrunk a section of South 12th Avenue down to one lane in each direction (with a middle lane for making left turns) a few years ago to slow traffic down and make the area more pedestrian-friendly.
While that’s an unlikely solution for Broadway, it would only take a can of paint and a few signs to resurrect the crossing on Belvedere.
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We were always taught to “write what you know” and we’re not above using this newsletter to complain about our crosswalk being removed.