UDOT hits the brakes on 300 West bikeway extension to Pioneer Park. 

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• Salt Lake City
• A project map for the 300 West bikeway extension shows the removal of a critical block at UDOT's behest.

LOWER AVENUES—A long-in-the-works project to extend the 300 West bikeway north into downtown will fall one tantalizing block short of Pioneer Park and the decade-old protected cycling lanes on 300 South, Salt Lake City's streets division confirmed Wednesday.

An update to the city's project website attributed the abrupt change in plans to an edict from the Utah Department of Transportation, which owns portions of 300 West as part of its Highway 89 right-of-way, beginning at 400 South and extending north out of the city via Beck Street. The bikeway plan—which UDOT had been involved in and seemingly comfortable with for months—called for the removal of a row of inefficient street parking along the eastern edge of Pioneer Park to construct a barrier-protected two-way cycling track, preserving all existing vehicle travel capacity.

"The segment of the 300 West Bikeway between 300 South and 400 South falls within Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT) right-of-way," reads a note added to the bikeway's project map online. "At UDOT’s request, this portion of the bikeway was removed from the project. We are currently working to redesign the 400 South crossing to accommodate this request."

A UDOT spokesman did not respond to multiple requests for comment. And while not directly attributable to SB195, the move to revoke approval for a previously-greenlit project sets a troubling precedent in the wake of the bill, which created a new level of state oversight controlling Salt Lake City's local street planning and operations.

UDOT executive director Carlos Braceras was recently critical of Salt Lake City's approach to traffic calming and multi-modal investment. The city has sought opportunities to reconfigure its notoriously wide thoroughfares to better distribute space among road users, but Braceras said that UDOT prefers to accomodate cycling and transit riding only so far as no "subtraction" is required of driving space.

"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."

Jon Larsen, Salt Lake City transportation director, declined to comment on UDOT's decision to dead-end the 300 West bikeway at 400 South. But he added that so far, UDOT has shown no indication that they plan to reduce a similar project, the 400 South Viaduct Trail, which will overlap with several blocks of UDOT's highway jurisdiction on the route to its intended endpoint at the 200 West protected bike lanes.

"I don't have anything to say about it," Larsen said. "It was UDOT's decision."

But other members of the city administration, who weren't authorized to speak on the record, noted the timing of UDOT's change of heart, as it arrived too late to incorporate plans for a cycling connection into an upcoming renovation of Pioneer Park. Had the city been aware of UDOT's opposition earlier, these officials suggested, a more intuitive connection in and out of Pioneer Park could have been planned for the bikeway's new dead-end terminus.

The shift also comes at the same time that a group of influential property and business owners have ramped up their opposition to safe street designs and investment, insisting without evidence—and often in the face of contradictory evidence—that bike lanes, traffic calming, mid-block crossings and lane reductions are generating scorched-earth traffic congestion and economic collapse with no corresponding use by actual cyclists and pedestrians.

Meanwhile, Salt Lake City plans to host it's annual Open Streets on Main during June, in which Friday and Saturday evenings will see Main Street closed to vehicle traffic between 400 South and South Temple and transformed into a pedestrian promenade and high-frequency transit corridor.

• Benjamin Wood
• Cyclist utilize the 300 West cycle track near 1500 South on May 4, 2024.

The loss of the 300 block in the city's bikeway plan is particularly notable for the connection that would have been created had it maintained UDOT's blessing. Salt Lake City has already constructed a protected two-way cycle track on 300 West between 2100 South and 900 South, and breaking through to 300 South would have facilitated longer-distance bike commuting in and out of the city by visitors and workers from areas like South Salt Lake, Murray and Millcreek.

Together with 200 West, the 300 South cycling lanes were Salt Lake City's first in-street protective infrastructure for bike riders, a hard-fought priority of the then-Ralph Becker administration. Before Becker, decades of city leadership opted to hand ever-larger amounts of asphalt over to high-speed commuter traffic, while pushing local cyclists to use purely recreational facilities like the Liberty Park bike loop, or asking non-drivers to use what are not-so-affectionately known as "shame flags" by the people forced to rely on them to cheat death crossing downtown streets.

On Thursday, Gov. Spencer Cox held a press conference on the lawn of the Governors Mansion on South Temple, backed by roughly a dozen Wasatch Front mayors who had participated in a summit on the need for attainable housing. Cox lauded cities like Clearfield for pursuing transit-oriented density and missing middle, multi-family housing. But he scoffed at the notion that bike lanes and pedestrian infrastructure play a role in addressing Utah's housing crisis.

"I don’t know if bike lanes create housing," Cox said.

The press conference being hosted on the mansion lawn was atypical for Cox, who has previously made a point to note that he does not primarily live in the city and prefers to commute back and forth to his family property in rural Utah. He said Salt Lake City is unique as the state's capital, and subject to greater levels of tension with state government than other municipalities.

And he candidly added that while no mayor standing with him would like to lose their street authority, they're not plausibly at risk of being targeted in the way that Salt Lake City and its—largely left-leaning—resident representatives are.

"They’re also probably not at risk of losing [street authority] because they’re not the capital city’s mayors," Cox said.

One notable absence at the governor's press conference was Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall, who told City Weekly earlier that day that she was on her way to the housing summit during a chance encounter at Poplar Grove's Joaquina Mexican Snacks. Mendenhall presumably attended the conference but had more pressing matters to attend to afterward than a photo op in the scorching hot sun, though her "cousin," Spanish Fork Mayor Mike Mendenhall—not actually related—attended the press conference and offered remarks on his city's commitment to building starter homes.