Utah’s political class is always reminding us that, whatever it is about our state we may not like, it could be worse.
We could be California.
Yet there can be no greater example of the Californiacation of Utah than the Department of Transportation’s $3.7 billion plan to widen I-15 for a stretch through Salt Lake City.
That price tag, up from a previous estimate of $1.7 billion just a few years ago, should be enough of a shock to move the Utah Legislature to deny funding for the plan and pour the money into alternative transportation schemes, primarily commuter and light rail, express bus service and more tolls on the highway.
The reason why UDOT wants to spend so much of your money to widen I-15 — other than the fact that laying more concrete is in its DNA — is that the roadway is so snarled during peak times that driving becomes more dangerous and the slow-and-go traffic leaves that much more carbon pollution in the local air.
As the population grows, UDOT reasons, those problems will only get worse. So we need to increase I-15 to six lanes in each direction from Farmington through Salt Lake City to handle the growing demand.
And that’s true, as far as it goes. But UDOT’s thinking doesn’t get us very far before hitting a dead end.
That’s why many local leaders, such as Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall, are opposed to the project. And why some independent experts say the state’s claim that air pollution generated by the widened highway will be within federal limits is bogus.
Research and experience from Utah and around the nation prove that widening a major highway such as I-15 will ease traffic flow for a time. But it won’t be long before more and more people will be drawn to commute along that improved stretch of pavement, and traffic flow problems will come back to be as bad as they are now, if not worse.
Traffic engineers call it “induced demand,” and it happens just about every time.
Then what? Widen I-15 again?
How many times can we do that? How much will that cost? How many more homes and businesses — some on the National Register of Historic Places — will have to be demolished to make way for an ever-wider freeway? How much will traffic flow be impeded during the next wave of construction? And the wave after that?
Perhaps the idea is to eventually reduce traffic on I-15 by demolishing everything that was worth driving to.
The plans aren’t all awful. There are provisions for more pedestrian and bicycle friendly paths and links to get over the superhighway, mitigating just a bit the wall the highway has always been between east and west Salt Lake City.
On balance, though, the plan to widen I-15 through Salt Lake City is a textbook example of how to make things worse by doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
The plan issued by UDOT earlier this month is technically all the paperwork it needs to do before going on to more detailed design work and acquiring the extra land needed for all that concrete. It already has the original legislative allocation of $1.7 billion in its institutional pocket.
But if you went to an automobile dealer on Monday and agreed to buy a car, only to be told on Wednesday that the price of that auto had doubled — and its fuel efficiency was half what you’d been promised — you’d be well within your rights to cancel your order.
That’s why the Legislature should waste no time — not wait until their next regular session in January — to tell UDOT that the rest of the needed money isn’t assured and that designers must at least pause this project until everyone can have another look.
