A number of residents have been asking, "what's with that massive wall" on the east side of the Oracle Road Scenic Corridor near Catalina State Park.
I had a very informative conversation with the gentleman from ADOT, Steve Spear, who explained all the answers.
After two or three community meetings with the affected residents of Rams Canyon, to the immediate east, the majority of respondents opted for a noise suppression wall because of the widening of Oracle road.
An ADOT engineering study determined in order to reduce the decibels from 116db without the wall, to a more manageable 80db, required the wall to be the height that it is.
Mr. Spear indicated that when completed, the wall that starts to the south at Rams Pass will cross the CDO wash (not yet done) and continue to the Catalina State Park, and will be painted a ''desert tan" and blend in much better.
However, for anyone driving north on Oracle road, the view of The Catalina Mountains is totally obliterated.
I guess that's the price for progress!
11 comments:
Keep your eyes on the road not the mountain.
Anyone who understands acoustics will be glad to tell you that the noise level on the west side of Oracle will now be much higher (simply put, noise bounces, echos). So those of you west of that wonderful Vestar development will now have a much noisier environment to contend with.
Didn’t the people who bought those house east of Oracle know there was going to be noise issues?
I drove by the wall in question recently and thought, "How nice. They've replaced the view of the mountains with a wall containing a drawn on picture of the mountains."
THIS is precisely why I hate unnecessary development. One thing leads to another.
Build more homes.
Now we must build more stores.
Increase the traffic.
Now we must widen the roads.
Create more noise.
Build a wall to buffer the noise.
Destroy the once beautiful view.
Destroy the once beautiful town.
Gee whiz, on the 'beltway' around and through Phoenix and Scottsdale, etc., ADOT used a low noise pavement (rubberized tar?). Is ADOT using this for our beautiful Oracle Road as an aid to noise reduction Did ADOT take into consideration that this is not a freeway with high speed traffic, but simply another boulevard of which there are thousands throughout the country WITHOUT these hideous so called barriers. It appears that throughout Oro Valley, the beautiful desert created by nature over millions of years is giving way to human destruction in just a few short years.
Perhaps the following article might shed some light as to why the monster wall will be more of an eyesore than a noise deterrent.
http://www.mocpa.com/noisewall.html
Art, perhaps you should send your last comment and the 'link' to Steve Spear, of ADOT; if you give someone (Rams Canyon in this case) statistics that are skewed because of faulty, irrelevent gobbledegook the recipient, Rams Canyon in this case, is going to come away with a whole lot of superfluous statistics and will therefor be slammed with a bunch of BS as a basis for an erroneous conclusion AND will further damage the value to THEIR properties. In the meantime the whole of Oro Valley suffers (again).
Bill,
You said, "Keep your eyes on the road not the mountain." What about passengers in the car? When I'm driving, my husband takes in the view and vice versa. When we have out of town company, we take them on scenic drives in the area. That used to include Tangerine Road and Oracle Road. I guess now when we drive down Oracle, we can say, "And behind that wall is a beautiful view of the mountains."
Paraphrasing Ronald Reagan----
Someone needs to step up and say:
ADOT: "Tear Down That Wall!"
Art, I was just thinking about that myself (just passed The Wall on my way home). And there are still those who think Oro Valley is the cat's meow for future businesses. Businesses who are willing to transfer here from other towns, enterprises who are willing to open new futures, those who can foresee the desirability of any given area, they most certainly will not opt for a walled city, a town with a warehouse rooftop appearance at one of it's main intersections, a town with a menage of empty storefronts, plans for an electrical substation nearby with it's accompanying myriad of power lines, more reckless housing developments, and so forth. In real substance - a lot of pomp, no circumstance, and no money.
Yes, keepers of the town, there is no here here. And what is left appears to be eroding away. EVERYBODY, it's time to get off your collective butts, realize there's a problem 'right here in river city', and start finding ways to right an out-of-control train before it derails entirely.
It's all ugly, very, very ugly.
While the wall is ugly, maybe it will keep the music that plays continuously over the Vestar stero system in the malls parking lot; confined to Vestar's property.
raindancer
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