One City, Very Different Drives
Phoenix runs on urban villages, and the village planning committees exist precisely because the city is too large to treat as a unit. The same is true of getting to an appointment. Here is the honest picture for a weekday outside peak hours.
| Area | Minutes | Route |
|---|---|---|
| South Phoenix and Baseline Road | 12 | Baseline Road east, or the I-10 for one exit |
| Downtown and Roosevelt Row | 20 | I-10 south through the Deck Park Tunnel |
| Encanto and Willo | 22 | Seventh Street south to the I-10 |
| Arcadia | 25 | SR-143 south to the I-10 or the Loop 202 |
| Camelback East and Biltmore | 27 | SR-51 south to the I-10 |
| North Phoenix and Cactus Road | 33 | SR-51 the entire way |
| Desert Ridge and Deer Valley | 38 | Loop 101 to the SR-51, then south |
The variable in every one of these numbers is the Broadway Curve, the stretch of I-10 between the airport and Baseline Road. It is the busiest freeway segment in Arizona. Booking a mid-morning appointment is worth about fifteen minutes of your life.
The Case for Phoenix Professionals
A large fraction of adult Ortho-K patients from Phoenix work downtown, at Sky Harbor, in the Camelback corridor, or in one of the hospital systems, and they share a specific complaint. Glasses fog and slip. Soft lenses dry out by two in the afternoon in an air-conditioned office, and the second half of the workday is spent blinking.
Does Ortho-K help with dry eye from office air conditioning?
Often, yes, because the mechanism is different. With Ortho-K there is no lens on the eye during waking hours at all, so the tear film is not being disrupted for ten hours a day. The lens does its work while you sleep and comes out in the morning. That said, severe dry eye can also make overnight wear uncomfortable, which is one of the things a candidacy exam evaluates directly.
- Airline crews out of Sky Harbor stop carrying lens solution through security.
- Trades workers lose the safety-glasses-over-prescription-glasses problem.
- Anyone weighing surgery gets a reversible answer. Read Ortho-K for adults.
Myopia in a City This Size
Phoenix Union is one of the largest high school districts in the state, and the elementary districts that feed it, Osborn, Madison, Roosevelt, Isaac, and Alhambra among them, collectively enroll well over a hundred thousand children. Nearsightedness in that population is neither rare nor evenly distributed, and it is rising in step with device-heavy instruction.
What we can do is slow the rate. Ortho-K is among the most studied optical methods for that, and it has the practical advantage of correcting the child during the day at the same time. Parents get an intervention and a pair of clear eyes from the same lens.
Getting Here From Anywhere in Phoenix
- From the north, the SR-51 down to the I-10 beats the surface grid at almost every hour.
- From the west side, the Loop 202 South Mountain Freeway avoids the downtown interchange entirely.
- From anywhere, exit the I-10 at Chandler Boulevard and head west to 48th Street. Full detail is on the directions page.