Add your name to the opposition petition by emailing volunteer@savenorthcentral.com and take the survey at: www.phoenix.gov/streets/lanechanges/Central.

Residents WEIGH-IN about the city's proposal and how it will affect the safety and life-style of North Central

  • Do you want your regular commute down Central to take an additional hour each day?
  • Did you know that the City of Phoenix wants to reduce Central Ave to one lane in each direction from Bethany Home Road north to the Arizona Canal
  • The buses and watering trucks will partially block the only thru road on Central, impeding the flow of traffic or stopping it altogether
  • This will create daily gridlock and turn Central into a parking lot. Good luck ever getting your kids to school on time again.
  • This unwanted change will funnel speeding drivers through the surrounding neighborhoods endangering your families.
  • The City of Phoenix refuses to do a study of how this change will impact our neighborhoods.
  • Multi-use lanes being shared by buses, cars turning right, trash pickup vehicles, and bikes are being misrepresented and sold as dedicated bike lanes.
Only 0.6% of commuters, citywide, are estimated to commute by bicycle. (See accompanying bar graph and chart.) Does it make sense to add bike lanes to Central Avenue at the expense of two travel lanes for motor vehicles?
"A traffic "equilibrium" study is needed to determine where all of the cars displaced by the loss of a travel lane will end up going. Based on a quick evaluation of (admittedly old) city traffic volume data for Central, 7th Avenue, and 7th Street, both north and southbound volume on Central is about 10,000 vehicles per day. If capacity is cut by 50%, then there are about 5,000 cars per day that need to get either north or south to some destination that would be displaced by the loss of that lane. Basic traffic flow theory says that they'll distribute themselves across all available routes, searching for a path of least resistance, until some equilibrium is reached. That means that, at a minimum, all three of these north/south arterials will get additional traffic (with Central getting additional "per lane" traffic) Given that Central Ave is the only one of the three that allows left turns (in either direction) during peak traffic hours, that would tend to indicate that some proportion of the Central traffic must stay on Central in order to make the turns that the need to make. Since 7th Street is widely acknowledged to be close to its maximum capacity, particularly for southbound traffic, it's unlikely that it could absorb a significant proportion of this displaced traffic.