UDOT self-evaluation gives highway department top marks for following its own safety rules. 

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• Benjamin Wood
• The Utah Capitol looms over the only bike rack on the state's government complex on Wednesday, June 18, 2025.

CAPITOL HILL—The Utah Department of Transportation is doing a wonderful job applying UDOT safety standards to the roads UDOT builds, according to an internal review by UDOT employees.

That self-congratulatory pat on the back was the primary message from the highway department to state lawmakers on Wednesday, aiming to silence concerns around the lack of safe crossings and turning locations on high-speed, multi-lane surface roads.

"The general conclusion we found in our audit report is UDOT has a robust process," said Shane Young, UDOT's internal audit director.

UDOT agreed to review its methods for evaluating traffic light placement in November, after members of the Transportation Interim Committee shelved plans for a potential bill that would have forced an outside review of the state's road safety standards. The issue was specifically raised by West Jordan Rep. Ken Ivory and his constituents, who question UDOT's refusal to place a traffic signal at the intersection of 1075 West and 9000 South (aka Highway 209).

UDOT is currently in the process of widening 9000 South from four driving lanes to six. And residents caution that safety hazards on the street, which has already seen frequent and repeat collisions at predictable locations, will only worsen as traffic expands to fill the additional asphalt dividing neighbors from each other and from community destinations like churches and schools.

"Do we have to wait for 10 accidents when we know there’s an ultra-hazardous condition?" Ivory asked. "It would stand to reason if we’re adding more lanes, that adds some complexities."

On Wednesday, Ivory appeared dissatisfied with the findings of UDOT's auditors, which largely focused on whether or not Utah adheres to the federal Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices (or MUTCD) and which offered little insight into the quality or content of the MUTCD standards themselves. In essence, UDOT's audit found the department does a good job applying federal road criteria, but offered no judgement on whether those criteria are appropriate for designing Utah neighborhoods.

Asked about the quality of the MUTCD's guidelines, Young noted only that they are generally used by most state departments of transportation.

"It is a strong framework that also includes the judgement of the professional engineer to make those determinations," Young said. "They appear to be generally-accepted practices."

But Ivory pushed back, noting that engineers have discretion to adapt MUTCD standards to local needs. He said the general use of those guidelines—which also include the size, shape and color of interstate freeway signage and road markings—does not equate to a wholesale endorsement of their safety approach for routing highways through residential areas.

"Some type of following [the standards] is different from complete, rigid adherence," Ivory said. "The thought on the ground is that [widening 9000 South to six lanes] would only increase the danger and difficulty of trying to execute a left-hand turn, and the types of accidents they see."

Contrary to how UDOT's Young described the MUTCD, the federal standards are, in fact, highly controversial and frequently disputed by urban-based transportation experts and road safety advocates. They primarily score roads based on vehicle traffic—often at the direct expense of non-driving road users and green landscaping—and typically encourage transportation departments to add safe crossings only after a sufficient amount of death and injury has been recorded at a specific location.

The standards also do not account for a desired crossing, measuring only the number of people who attempt to use a road under its current conditions. Under that dynamic, widening a road like 9000 South might encourage local drivers and pedestrians to avoid the highway and instead divert to other routes, which in turn leads UDOT to measure fewer people at a crossing or turning location and, thus, determine less need for a traffic signal despite the increase in danger to vulnerable road users.

“American streets are unsafe because of how they are designed. And the way they’re designed often comes down to five letters: the MUTCD,” Transportation for America director Beth Osborne said in 2021, prior to recent updates to the manual.

States are also incentivized to rely on the federal guidelines out of fear of being inconsistent with their regional partners, and because developing an independent set of road standards is costly and time consuming. A similar dynamic is often at play with national standards, like the Common Core education framework that became an acute source of controversy in Utah. It's unclear why Utah Republican objection to D.C.-based rules does not translate to the intractable, out-of-state, car-centric highway guidelines that shape Utahn's lives.

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• Utah Department of Transportation
• A slide from a UDOT presentation shows how drivers are measured three times before pedestrians comes into account in the state's traffic signal evaluation process.

UDOT's audit report on Wednesday included a presentation on its scoring criteria for whether or not a traffic signal is warranted. Those criteria showed that UDOT measures car traffic three different ways, with only one pedestrian-specific data point and no specific criteria for bike and transit use.

"At least one of the criteria needs to be met in order to have justification for installing a traffic control device," Young said. "One, two and three are probably the most common—where it looks at traffic flow."