FLASHBACK 1997: Karen Denton clears the air about city planning to UDOT and Mike Leavitt. 

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In commemoration of City Weekly's 40th anniversary, we are digging into our archives to celebrate. Each week, we FLASHBACK to a story or column from our past in honor of four decades of local alt-journalism. Whether the names and issues are familiar or new, we are grateful to have this unique newspaper to contain them all.

Title: Erroneous Concepts
Author: Karen Denton
Date: Apr. 24, 1997

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Dear Tom Warne, executive director of the Utah Department of Transportation, and Gov. Mike Leavitt:

I am writing to you both about the Long Range Transportation Plan and the Major Investment Studies currently examining the prospect of additional highways. These projects, which will cost the state $5 billion for a massive road building program over the next 10 years, are based on the assumptions that cars are the only way to move people around the Wasatch Front, that more roads will reduce congestion and that any possible impact on neighborhoods will be minimal.

All these concepts are erroneous.

A 1995 study conducted by Mark Hansen at the University of California at Berkeley examined the first premise: California is increasingly concerned with both the number of cars on the road and the number of miles traveled by each car. He and his colleagues found that rather than decreasing congestion, adding more lanes actually encourages substantial new traffic.

Additionally, they found “The most consistent source of traffic growth has been population growth.” That’s the same population increase that we not only expect in this state, but are actively encouraging.

For a clear example of the ways that highways determine communities, look at Sandy. Sandwiched between State Street and I-15, Sandy City Hall is really just an extension of the shopping malls to its south. There is no city center and no pedestrian-friendly access to the buildings stretched out over the area. Developers and city officials could have clustered the buildings to encourage alternative transportation, such as buses. Or more particularly, they could have designed a light rail station as a focal point for everything else.

The Bangerter and proposed Legacy Highways will similarly define West Valley City unless we intervene now.

We do have choices other than ribboning the valley with pavement. What we need is an integrated plan that delivers people efficiently from one place to another using a minimum of resources. It should encourage livable communities—ones in which motorists, pedestrians and bicyclists safely co-mingle, and green space is built into the designs.

Land use, air quality and transportation are interrelated. We have put transportation first when the real starting point is land use. Other cities have tackled this problem, most notably Portland, Ore., which managed to reframe the discussion from “How do we get from point A to point B?” to “How do we utilize the land more beneficially and then create supportive public policies?”

Denver has studied this as well. Its Regional Council of Governments found that integrating a variety of land uses, such as housing, commercial development and open spaces with transportation alternatives will save $15,000 per household in regional and local infrastructure costs.

Studies conducted in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., too, suggest that a high quality of life can still be maintained with integrated land use.

So here’s the chance for Utah to strut its stuff by designing a regional, integrated land-use plan that is creative, innovative and refreshingly different. Or, we could do the same old thing and just build roads that will ultimately divide rather than connect communities. We have a challenge in this state. We’re asking you, gentlemen, to accept it.