Salt Lake City would have to justify its street safety decisions under new, committee-approved version of SB195 

click to enlarge

• Benjamin Wood
• A work crew power-washes a new roundabout on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, Feb. 26. SB195 would block Salt Lake City from constructing any new street safety improvements.

CAPITOL HILL—Members of the House Transportation Committee voted 10-2 on Thursday to advance a bill that would "pause" future road safety projects in Salt Lake City while inserting new levels of state highway bureaucracy into the design of local neighborhood streets.

Under the latest version of SB195, Salt Lake City would be able to start construction on its next round of street improvement work. But other projects to enhance walkability on the horizon—from the Green Loop linear park around downtown to traffic calming initiatives planned throughout the city—would be contingent on approval by the Utah Department of Transportation, after a new round of formal study on any street reconfiguration since 2015 or planned to occur before 2035.

"We’ve seen traffic actually shift off of existing city streets and over to state routes as [driving] restricitons have come in place," said Sen. Wayne Harper, R-Taylorsville, the bill's sponsor.

Harper added that it's not necessarily a good or bad thing that car traffic is diverting off of sleepy neighborhood streets and onto multi-lane state-owned surface highways (like Redwood Road, State Street and 700 East) built and designed to accommodate large number of private vehicles. But he suggested that Salt Lake City's plans to better utilize its notoriously wide and deadly rights-of-way could impact "level of service" on state roads—referring to the metric that UDOT relies on to evaluate road performance, which includes only the number of cars that pass through a road each hour, with no consideration of the number of pedestrians, cyclists or transit riders, whether they be 1 person or 1,000 people.

"The level of service on some of our state roads is decreasing," Harper said.

SB195 started the session as a bipartisan, non-controversial package of transportation related adjustments to state code, an annual exercise known as the "omnibus" bill. But Harper caught many Salt Lake stakeholders by surprise with undisclosed amendments to the legislation, including members of the Senate Minority Caucus, who initially voted in favor of SB195 before discovering the extent of what Harper had slipped into the language during floor debate. All Senate democrats then moved for their votes to be changed to the negative. After passing the Senate, Harper and city representatives engaged in a series of closed-door debates on changes to the bill.

The new version of the bill adopted Thursday would apply only to work on "collector" and "arterial" roads—legal distinctions that generally exclude small neighborhood streets but include the entirety of the greater downtown area—and projects advertised before March 7 would be allowed to continue. That provision would appear to allow work to begin on the 400 South Viaduct Trail and 300 West bikeway, which will see barrier-protected cycling facilities added within the existing footprints of those roadways.

"A new version of  S.B. 195 will clarify the pause will only apply to new permanent projects and not temporary projects," Harper said in a prepared statement. "Utah Department of Transportation, in coordination with  Salt Lake City and other stakeholders, will review all proposed highway mobility programs before authorizing any new projects. A comprehensive mobility study will be conducted to identify the impacts on state highways, collectors and arterial roads. This plan covers the area from 2100 South to 600 North to I-15 to Foothill."

The legislation codifies a number of false, yet persistent, misconceptions about urban mobility. While Salt Lake City has reconfigured a number of its streets in recent years—in some cases removing or repurposing redundant vehicle lanes—those projects are proven to improve traffic flow while also improving safety for all road users. But drivers, annoyed by construction delays and the perceived loss of lane space, struggle to think in terms of a holistic transportation system and assume that traffic calming and other street improvements must be contributing to higher traffic congestion, despite all evidence to the contrary.

The data is also clear that roads owned and managed by UDOT—surface highways like State Street, Redwood Road and 700 East—are far more prone to collisions that result in death and injury than local city streets, even when compared against larger Salt Lake City-controlled streets with multiple lanes and highway-style traffic, but where traffic calming features are present.

During Thursday's committee hearing, public comment was overwhelmingly opposed to SB195, with several residents who intended to testify being turned away at the chairperson's discretion. Lauren Barlow, a Salt Lake City resident, talked about the children who walk to and from school in her neighborhood and the need for the city to be able to respond to unsafe conditions and promote safe routes.

"For the state to commission studies that are years long—that will prevent the city from making the best decisions they can, as professionals, to keep families and children safe," Barlow said.

But former Yalecrest Community Council chairwoman Jan Hemming, spoke in favor of SB195. She said that cycling advocates had "shamefully" used the deaths of children to encourage the proliferation of speed bumps by arguing that speed is a factor when drivers use moving cars to kill pedestrians.

"You are the only thing standing between my neighborhood and a terrible project that will place speed bumps on our quiet roads," Hemming said, pleading with suburban lawmakers to strip her locally elected city government of its street planning powers. "These bumps will cause traffic congestion and harmful emissions."

Under the new version of SB195, Salt Lake City would be compelled to exhaustively justify every decision made on its streets since 2015 or planned to be made before 2035, compiling a report for UDOT and other state leaders to either sign off on or reject the city's plans for its own street grid.

“The goal is to assess travel efficiency, optimize travel times, ensure safety and reduce congestion to ensure that future infrastructure changes are both effective and sustainable," Harper said. "The study will guide decision-making, addressing the needs of the state’s capital city while minimizing disruptions during the improvement phase.”

Representatives for Salt Lake City and the Utah Transit Authority did not respond to requests for comment, though Rachel Otto, Mayor Erin Mendenhall's chief of staff, joined the committee hearing remotely to thank the sponsor for working to address concerns, while not quite stating a position on the bill itself. Subsequent requests for clarification from City Hall were unsuccessful.