New Pima Canyon parking too tight for comfort

The idea was to revamp Pima Canyon to prevent visitors from parking on the dirt in the park and to make sure there was room for emergency vehicles to get to the trail head.

But in protecting the park, the number of vehicles that could be parked was severely reduced and the newly-striped parking spaces are so small that pickup trucks and sports utility vehicles can barely fit in.

“You have to be really careful when you park,” said Ryan Page of Tempe, who was in the park last week preparing to hike into South Mountain Park. “The spaces are just too small and people don’t know how to park.”

The spaces are small because Phoenix has a double standard when it comes to parallel parking spaces: 21 feet long for a metered parking space downtown and 18 feet everywhere else, including Pima Canyon.

“Eighteen feet is actually the minimum length of a parallel parking space,” said Sina Matthes, a spokesperson for the Phoenix Streets Department, which did the striping in Pima Canyon at the request of the parks department.

Since the average car is between 14 and 16 feet long, with sports utility vehicles and some pickups even longer, Matthes admitted that, “People with larger vehicles may not be able to park.”

But she said the length was selected to provide the maximum number of marked parking spaces on the north side of the access road into Pima Canyon.

Cindy Schueler has seen the traffic congestions created on a weekend, with vehicles circulating in and out of the area looking for a space since half the off-road parking, on the south side of the access road, was eliminated three weeks ago.

“On a weekend it’s impossible to park in these tiny spots” assuming that you can even find an open one, said Schueler, a registered nurse who lives in Ahwatukee Foothills and frequents the park three or four times a week.

The reason behind eliminating the off-road parking and creating marked parking spaces was simple: “We’ve got to preserve the preserve,” said South Mountain Park head ranger Kim Keith.

The problem was that vehicles were parking on the dirt, a no-no because it raises dust and damages the park, plus vehicles were parking along the access road and in the parking lot in such a way that fire trucks and emergency vehicles had problems getting to the trail head or getting out of the park.

“We thought about angled parking but the street isn’t wide enough for two lanes,” Keith said, so parking was eliminated along the south side of the road and parallel parking put on the north side.

That boosted the number of marked parking spaces from around 40, at the trail head, to 140 at the trail head and along the access road.

But it also eliminated almost half of the unofficial parking that visitors were used to, on the south side of the access road.

“I talked to someone that was trying to park last Saturday at 8 a.m. - there were no spots available and he had to circle several times until one opened up,” said Rich Grams, a frequent visitor to the park. “That can’t help safety.”

The root problem is that Pima Canyon receives 1,200 to 1,500 vehicles a day and is one of just two access points on the Ahwatukee Foothills side of the park with parking. The other, on Desert Foothills Parkway near 6th Street, has just two dozen parking spaces.

Keith suggested that people who can’t find parking can access the park from 46th Street off Baseline Road, where the Beverly Canyon area has parking and, on weekends, overflow parking available from several businesses in the area.

But that didn’t satisfy Charles Fox last week.

“This is stupid,” he said while trying to park and get his bicycle out for an afternoon ride.

Doug Murphy can be reached at (480) 898-7914 or dmurphy@aztrib.com.