The wildly confusing roads in Scottsdale, Arizona


As an old marketing guy, and a graphic designer, I know that certain things happen with the best intentions. And making a loop around Old Town Scottsdale was definitely a good idea. But the confusing way that it was done almost seems as if they were trying to make things difficult for people who aren't familiar with the town, the tourists. But I'm sure they meant well!

If you haven't driven through old Scottsdale recently, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that Old Town Scottsdale has been preserved, and looks great. The bad news is how the loop was created, and named.

With best intentions, the loop honors two people who are important in Arizona history - Herb Drinkwater and Barry Goldwater. Unfortunately, having two streets that kinda sound like "Something-water" to people who are not familiar with these names is a bit of a mistake. If I were a tourist and someone told me to take Drinkwater, I would see the sign that said Goldwater and figure it was "Something-water". And it gets worse.

To get to Drinkwater, you look for Drinkwater, but to get to Goldwater, at least from the north (which is where most of Scottsdale is nowadays) you look for Highland. I wouldn't even want to try to describe it to an out-of-town visitor! So, to go south, you go west...

Of course, if you live there, it's no problem at all. That's how it works. The streets where people live could be the most complex gobbledy-gook in the world, and everyone who lived there would be fine. They would get used to it. I've lived in places like that, and it's just fine. But for people from out-of-town, it's a mess, and a headache.

If you're wondering if people coming from out-of-town are important to Scottsdale, all I can say is that they're the lifeblood of the city. Making things difficult for tourists is really not what you want in a city that relies so much on tourism. I'm just sayin'.

Presumably it's all made easy by GPS saying "turn left, turn right", especially if it's your Uber driver doing it, or the chauffeur for your limousine. And since I only visit Scottsdale in January, for the car shows, it really doesn't matter to me. I'm not driving, and I'm not giving directions.

I think you need to turn on Something-water!
Help support history adventuring, and see a lot of cool old photos of Phoenix on Patreon

 Click here to become a Patron!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me
Read more