I have to hand it to the Daily Star, they’re suddenly all over anything to do with Sonora:
MESA – A new Web site is warning people who plan on driving into Mexico about construction work, severe weather, road closures and car accidents.
The Arizona Department of Transportation recently launched the site, http://www.az511.gov/Sonora, to report details about traffic tie-ups in the Mexican state of Sonora, which borders Arizona. …
The site, modeled after one that has long been posting traffic information for drivers in Arizona, is thought to be the first international project of its type in the United States.
D’Angelo said the transportation department also plans to add information in the next few months about how long the wait is at border crossings.
This is a nice tool for the Sonora traveler – although it’s worth noting that live-ish border crossing times are already available – thanks to the US Customs And Border Protection website.
Along those same lines: it’s a pretty common thing to gripe about the wait times at the border, but Terry over at playa-encanto.com has been proactive in drumming up support to try and convince folks to ask the Arizona Department of Transportation to allocate resources towards expanding the Lukeville entry with a few more lanes. There’s some promising back and forth between him and AzDOT posted on the playa-encanto.com site that’s worth checking out.
Speaking hypothetically here, I don’t see how they can affort not to expand that crossing over the next few years. With the boom in Sonoran tourism – not to mention the coastal highway coming online – that Lukeville-to-Phoenix corridor is only going to get a heck of a lot busier. AzDOT’s done a pretty good job of fixing up the actual roads over the last ten years, so one hopes that putting some resources into the port of entry itself is next on the list.
