Anyone who has pulled out of Little America onto Butler Avenue during a Friday afternoon has seen it. A semi truck, coming from the hotel's east lot, cuts left across two lanes of oncoming traffic to head toward I-40. Cars brake. Someone lays on a horn. The truck makes it through, mostly because everyone else adjusts around it.
That single left turn is the reason Canyon Del Rio is about to get a new roundabout, and it is not going in where most residents would guess.
The Corner You'd Bet On Isn't the One Getting Fixed First
Ask anyone who drives Fourth Street daily where the city's new roundabout is headed, and the answer is almost always "Butler and Fourth." It is the busiest, most visible intersection in the corridor, and it sits close enough to Canyon Del Rio that residents treat it as the neighborhood's front door.
That intersection is not settled yet. The city's Butler-Fourth Improvements Project page still lists it as an open question, with planners weighing a conventional signal against a roundabout. What has already been decided is the geometry at Herold Ranch Road, a quarter mile east, which will be realigned into a two-lane roundabout as part of the same project.
The reason traces straight back to that truck at Little America. City planners have described the current setup on that stretch of Butler as one that lets semi traffic exiting Little America cut across oncoming lanes to reach the interstate. The fix on the table is a new center median that blocks the left turn outright. Trucks would be forced right, then loop back through the new roundabout at Herold Ranch Road to reverse direction and reach I-40 from the other side. It is a longer route for the truck, and a safer one for everyone driving past Little America at the same time.
That is the kind of design choice that looks strange until you know what problem it is solving. Once you know, the roundabout at Herold Ranch Road stops looking like an odd placement and starts looking like the whole point.
What's Actually Changing at Your Corner
The project itself is bigger than one intersection. According to the city's current scope, it widens Butler Avenue from the Little America area out to the Sinagua Heights subdivision, and widens Fourth Street from Warm Springs Trail and Sparrow Avenue south to the edge of the Canyon Del Rio development itself. Residents are not adjacent to this project. The project's stated boundary is their neighborhood.
A few specifics worth knowing if you live along that stretch:
- The Butler and Fourth intersection will be raised as part of the redesign, a move aimed at reducing flooding from Spruce Avenue Wash, a drainage path that has caused standing water at that corner during past monsoon seasons.
- Planned improvements include off-street bike lanes and sidewalks separated from vehicle travel lanes, along with new FUTS trail segments built into the project rather than added later.
- The Herold Ranch Road intersection becomes a roundabout regardless of what happens at Butler and Fourth, since it is the mechanism for the truck reroute described above.
- No roadway realignment has been finalized at Butler and Fourth itself. That decision is still pending.
For a neighborhood that Capstone Homes markets as directly connected to the Flagstaff Urban Trails System, the bike and pedestrian pieces matter as much as the traffic pieces. The stretch of FUTS trail that residents already use to reach the rest of the network runs through exactly the corridor this project touches.
The Money Question, Answered Twice
Flagstaff's city council first discussed this project in 2023 with a cost estimate around $16 million, funded through the city's Transportation Tax, the local sales tax approved by voters through Proposition 403 in 2000 and expanded through Proposition 419 in 2018. That was the local funding picture for two years.
Then, in early 2025, the city announced it had secured a $19 million federal RAISE grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation, aimed squarely at covering a large share of the safety and multimodal work along this same corridor. Mayor Becky Daggett called the award "critical to providing access and connectivity in the City." City Engineer Paul Mood credited the design team's grant application for landing the funding at a stage he described as 30% design.
For residents, the practical read is this. Design work is real and funded, but a construction start date has not been announced. If you are watching for orange cones on Fourth Street, you are watching too early. What is worth watching instead is the next round of public design decisions, since the city has said it plans to reengage the community and nearby businesses now that the RAISE grant has closed the funding gap. That is typically when a roundabout-versus-signal choice at Butler and Fourth gets made.
Where Fourth Street Is Actually Headed
There is a longer-range piece of this that rarely comes up in neighborhood conversations. Fourth Street is expected to eventually extend south, connecting through to JW Powell Boulevard, the same corridor that runs past Juniper Point and Pine Canyon on the other side of town. That connection does not exist yet, and this particular project does not build it. But it is the direction city planning has pointed for a while, and it explains why so much of the current corridor work treats Fourth Street as a growth spine rather than a residential side street.
For someone who already lives in Canyon Del Rio, the useful takeaway is not that traffic patterns will shift overnight. They will not. It is that the corner outside your neighborhood is being engineered for a version of Flagstaff that connects further south than it currently does, and the sidewalks, bike lanes, and trail segments going in now are being built with that longer reach in mind.
What This Looks Like on a Tuesday
None of this changes how Canyon Del Rio functions today. Butler Avenue still runs the way it always has. The FUTS connection behind the neighborhood is still open. Little America's truck traffic still makes that same left turn across oncoming lanes, at least for now.
What has changed is the certainty behind what comes next. The Herold Ranch Road roundabout is no longer a proposal on a planning document. It is funded, designed around a specific traffic problem, and waiting on the same construction timeline as the rest of the corridor. The Butler and Fourth question is the one still open, and it is worth checking the city's project page periodically if you want to know before the signage goes up.
For residents who bike the FUTS trail on weekend mornings or walk it after dinner, the more immediate news is that the planned trail segments in this project follow the same stretch you already use. When design moves past the current stage, that is the piece likely to show up first.
If you are weighing a move to Canyon Del Rio, or already call it home and want a clearer read on how projects like this one intersect with property values, build timelines, or resale positioning in this part of Flagstaff, Blake Cundick can walk through what it means for your specific address. Let's connect.
