Republican Utah legislators want to put the brakes on Salt Lake City’s plans to slow traffic, build calmer streets and make roads safer for bikers and walkers.
A late addition to transportation-focused SB195 calls for a roughly yearlong moratorium on new road projects that aim to reduce or slow down traffic on streets in Utah’s capital. The bill, introduced by Sen. Wayne Harper, R-Taylorsville, passed the GOP-dominated Senate on Thursday along party lines, 19-6, with six Democrats opposing the measure.
The moratorium would run from May 2025 to March 2026 as state transportation officials study all the traffic-calming projects the city had implemented or planned to build from July 2015 to July 2035.
During that period, the city would be barred from reducing the number of lanes on any of its roads, decreasing speed limits, adding speed bumps or otherwise implementing any street plans that have the potential to decrease the number of vehicles that can travel down a road in an hour.
The pause could affect a handful of ongoing and planned projects due for construction this year, including pedestrian improvements to 300 North, off-street bike lanes and traffic-calming measures to 600 North, and the continuing reconstruction of 2100 South in Sugar House.
The bill also prohibits the city from planning to implement any so-called highway reduction strategy, possibly complicating city officials’ ongoing efforts to design Mayor Erin Mendenhall’s downtown Green Loop.
Sweet Streets, a group that advocates for traffic-calming measures in Salt Lake City, encouraged its members in a Saturday morning email to voice their opposition to SB195, as currently written, by contacting legislators.
“While lawmakers claim SB195 is intended to plan for new traffic patterns around the Delta Center/Salt Palace district, the language of the bill is written so broadly and with such overt car-centrism that it prohibits any change to any street that would discourage high-speed driving, including a neighborhood stop sign or a crosswalk in front of a school,” the organization’s board of directors wrote. “...We need your help to raise the alarm about this damaging bill. “We need to make it clear to our elected representatives and senators that this kind of state overreach is unacceptable. We need to save our streets!”
The legislation now moves to the Utah House.
