Frustrated with the Traffic Snarl at the Flagstaff Mall?

Artist's Rendering of Final Intersection published by Arizona Department of Transportation

I come home from RE/MAX Peak Properties on the west side of town to my home in Northeast Rural Flagstaff, passing the Flagstaff Mall. Road work has been underway for months to reconfigure the Country Club Drive intersection with Highway 89, and to reconfigure access to the expanded mall property. The major work is now complete and the temporary detour has been removed, but Highway 89 is still filled with those little stripped posts with yellow reflectors on top and there are concrete barriers at the shoulders.

The lane reconfiguration is going to take some time to get used to. Drivers are finding their ways and avoiding the temporary shoulder and lane markers. All of this creates a snarl as we pass the Fanning Drive and Highway 89 intersection going north from town. Here’s a way to help: If your destination is the Flagstaff Mall and you are coming from downtown Flagstaff, turn right at the new Route 66 turn off from Highway 89. The turn is wider than it used to be and has a right turn lane. There are turns into the mall parking lot near J.C. Penny, and then a left turn off of Route 66 onto a new street called Mall Way. (Spur – the road that once ran behind the Flagstaff Mall, no longer exists.) As you proceed along Mall Way, you can turn left into the older part of the mall area, or proceed to an intersection with the new street called Market Place Drive. If you turn right at Market Place you go into the newer area of the mall with stores like Best Buy, Linens and Things, etc.  Or, you can turn left on Railhead and end up at the Safeway and Office Max stores, or head back up to intersect Highway 89.
 
Actually, the little detour (for me, on my way home) using Route 66 and Mall Way and proceeding up Railhead back onto Highway 89 has proved to take less time because there is virtually no traffic using the Route 66 entrances to the Flagstaff Mall. Old habits die hard, so people are still fighting their way to the Highway 89 mall entrances and along Highway 89 to Railhead to get to the new Marketplace Stores.  As people learn that it’s faster and easier to get to any mall destination from downtown Flagstaff by using the Route 66 turn, it’ll be easier for us who live further north to use Highway 89.

So mall shoppers hear this: End your frustration. Take Route 66 and go in what we have thought of as the back of the mall. It’s now the front!!

P.S. It may even be easier for those coming from Country Club Drive and heading to the Marketplace stores to turn left coming off that road onto Highway 89 instead of right. Take Highway 89 to the left turn onto Route 66 and then follow the route described above.