"It's OK to ask cars to slow down": Utah Transportation Commission launches SB195 review of SLC's street safety efforts. 

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• Benjamin Wood
• Pedestrians cross State Street (UDOT's Highway 89) at North Temple on April 11, 2025.

TAYLORSVILLE—Natalie Gochner has seen firsthand the effect of multi-modal streets in Salt Lake City, she said Friday. She's used the buffered bike lanes added to Main Street through a road diet to ride to events at the Delta Center, and she has watched the transformation of communities along 900 South after construction of the 9-Line Trail.

"I spend a lot of time in the capital city and I’ve seen what is happening—and it is different," Gochner, a member of the Utah Transportation Commission, told her colleagues. "Go see the life on the street that they are creating for their neighborhoods."

Gochner's comments came during discussion of SB195, which strips Salt Lake City of its local street authority and instead requires UDOT approval before making any change to a collector or arterial roadway that reduces the space afforded to drivers of private vehicles. The law, sponsored by Taylorsville Republican Sen. Wayne Harper, is limited to the city's east side, but goes far beyond state-owned highways like State Street and Redwood Road, effectively tying the city's hands on would-be alterations as minimal as a new school crosswalk, if that crosswalk impedes drivers in any way.

In passing SB195, lawmakers awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars to UDOT to conduct a study of Salt Lake City's street grid and street planning. The Utah Transportation Commission voted unanimously on Friday to launch that study, but several members of the commission expressed confusion about the purpose and motivations behind the legally-mandated effort.

"I don’t think it's right for UDOT to come in and impose things on those other neighborhood streets," Gochner said. "It is OK to ask cars to slow down. It is OK."

Carlos Braceras, executive director of UDOT, said it is the department's intention to work collaboratively with Salt Lake City to study the best solutions for the capital's transportation bottlenecks, which see thousands of visitors pouring into, over, around and through the city's residential neighborhoods alongside local traffic to shops, schools, churches and community destinations.

"This is an effort to try and quantify, as best as possible, the mobility benefits—as well as what some say are the negative impacts—of lane reductions," Braceras said. "Not every road can be everything for every person and every use."

But Braceras also suggested the SB195 episode—which saw car-based suburban commuters pitted against local Salt Lakers who want the option to walk, bike or ride transit safely in their city—was a "canary in the coal mine." The city had been making "incremental" progress on safe walking and cycling routes, but those plans reached a critical network convenience point at the same time that longstanding commuter patterns became ensnared in private redevelopment and utility construction work in the downtown core.

He also criticized Salt Lake City for repurposing redundant vehicle space for higher-capacity and active transportation uses, like bus-priority lanes and cycling lanes. Braceras contrasted SLC's approach with the way UDOT views active and public transportation—as a secondary or tertiary objective to be accommodated only where new space can be opened up without any "subtraction" from drivers.

"I think we need to find ways to not take away a lane, not take away access to a business, but also, how do we also provide that safe bicycling and walking access," Braceras said. "There has been a little bit of subtraction that has gone on in Salt Lake City."

Studies show that both retail sales and traffic flow is better on streets with multi-modal infrastructure, but UDOT has long resisted calls to design its highways around anything but moving the largest number of cars as quickly as possible. Bus rapid transit (BRT) projects around the state have been allowed to proceed only in conjunction with UDOT's highway widening—despite BRT lanes carrying far higher numbers of people per hour than general purpose vehicle lanes—and urban projects like the recent "Life on State" work near The Bayou has been limited to landscaping and sidewalk improvements, with no option of reducing or repurposing driving lanes.

During Friday's meeting, a joke about adding bike lanes to State Street triggered a round of laughter among commissioners. At the same meeting, commissioners approved a project to build a pedestrian underpass in Logan, with commissioner Jim Evans noting that without the underpass it is essentially impossible for a cyclist or pedestrian to follow the Logan River across Main Street, which is actually UDOT's Highway 89.

Gochner, who represents Salt Lake City on the Transportation Commission, emphasized to her colleagues that Utah's capital is on the rise, and that "dynamic urban living" is becoming more popular as residents utilize car-free connections to work, study, shop, worship and recreate around the city.

She encouraged UDOT to take the SB195 study seriously, and not to simply "brush it aside."

"This is a really big deal," she said. "Let’s not have this be a tool to divide the state and the capital city, but rather to bring it together and see that balance."

Harper, SB195's sponsor, declined to comment on Friday.