City reveals plans for Horseshoe Bend

The project is expensive, but the city will be able to recoup their expenses

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Coming on the heels of the National Park Service finishing the rail and viewing platform at Horseshoe Bend on July 2, the city of Page revealed their own Horseshoe Bend improvements at the July 11 city council work session.


The city will be making significant improvements to Horseshoe Bend’s parking lot in coming months.


The main additions the city will be making in the near future will be greatly expanding their parking lots, as well as making the entrances and exits to the site more accessible and less congested.


Horseshoe Bend currently can accommodate 100 cars and 18 RVs. This year the city has implemented a new plan that buses drop off their passengers and park elsewhere, presumably Page, and return at a later specified time and retrieve their passengers. This has greatly reduced congestion at the Horseshoe Bend parking lot.


After the expansion, the parking lot will have 310 parking spaces with the ability to expand further to accommodate 450 vehicles, if necessary.


The overall cost for the improvement project is expected to be just over $4 million. Part of the improvements will include fee gates for Horseshoe Bend visitors, which will allow the city to recoup its construction costs and maintain the property going forward.  


The city hasn’t made a final decision on what it may charge at the fee station but it will probably be around five dollars per person. It’s likely that the city will take part of the fee and Park Service will take part of it. The city will install at least two, and possibly three, fee gates for passenger vehicles with an additional lane for buses and commercial vehicles.
The city conducted a traffic survey from April 2017 to April 2018 and found that 5,000 to 6,000 people visit Horseshoe Bend on an average day. During that year 321,000 vehicles entered the parking lot, 11,400 of which were buses. During the yearlong traffic study the peak visitation occurred on Sept. 2, 2017, when 156 vehicles entered the parking lot in a single hour.


According to a document the city put out at the July 11 work session it plans to put the construction project out for bid on September  19 with construction beginning Oct. 25. Construction is intended to be finished by April 7, 2019.


“Visitation has grown astronomically in the past five or six years,” said Mayor Bill Diak during the work session. “The area was being degraded and abused. We realized we needed to protect it and make it safe for visitors.”