Utah lawmakers question UDOT's methods for safe crossings and traffic signals on busy highways. 

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• The intersection of 9000 South (Highway 209) and 1075 West, where residents have pushed UDOT to add a traffic signal and pedestrian crossing.

CAPITOL HILL—In the more than 30 years that Kathy Rollman has lived in West Jordan, just north of 9000 South, an "immense" amount of growth has added hundreds of homes, office buildings and other developments to the area.

And with that growth, Rollman said that 9000 South—or state Highway 209—has become "downright terrifying," with a lack of signalized intersections forcing neighbors to take meandering routes or risk cutting across five lanes of high-speed traffic.

"We call them 'suicide lanes'," Rollman said. "It really separates the community into two areas."

Rollman's comments came during a meeting of the state's Transportation Interim Committee on Wednesday. Another West Jordan resident, Sam Burggraaf, described how local children will run from one side of the surface highway to the other to meet up with their school friends or to attend church activities, without the aid of a pedestrian crosswalk.

But when members of the neighborhood have raised these concerns with the Utah Department of Transportation, they've been told that the road fails to meet the department's internal criteria for safety enhancements. And the problem is likely to get worse, as UDOT is currently in the process of widening 9000 South from five lanes to seven, creating new and larger barriers for adjacent residents to navigate while increasing the number of commuter cars on the road.

"Members of the committee, we are your neighbors and constituents and we plead with you to carefully review UDOT's current traffic signal warrant process," Burggraaf said. "Which one of us in this neighborhood has to die before a new stoplight will be implemented and named after us?"

Lawmakers on the committee ultimately took up Burggraaf's plea, voting unanimously to open a bill file to review and potentially alter the criteria that UDOT follows when determining the placement of crossings and traffic signals. While preliminary, the vote represented a rare critique of UDOT, whose driver-oriented approach to transportation typically enjoys a rubber stamp and robust funding from the state Legislature.

"If there's some improvements we can make, I'm very open to that," UDOT executive director Carlos Braceras said.

Dangerous highways were a recurring theme of Wednesday's committee hearing, which opened with a presentation on road safety by representatives of the Wasatch Front Regional Council (WFRC) and Mountainland Association of Government (MAG). LaNiece Davenport of MAG said that Utah's growth cannot be absorbed by roads and driving alone, but added that residents are unlikely to opt for transportation alternatives when it feels unsafe to walk, bike or ride transit.

"There's a paradigm shift right now when it comes to the safety of our roads," she said.

Kip Billings, of WFRC, said road management needs to be sensitive to the context and conditions of the communities a road passes through, and that design should support the appropriate speed for a particular area.

"This is a new approach and considers the needs in the urban area when setting speeds," he said. "This is more than just putting a number on the sign and expecting that to be the safe operating speed. The way a road is designed has a lot to do with speed management."

But the discussion of safety came to a head during the 9000 South presentation, as committee members shared anecdotes of their own squabbles with UDOT's highway designers, and with West Jordan's elected leaders reiterating the position of constituents that more needs to be done, or done differently.

"It's like trying to cross I-15. It's a very dangerous proposition," said Bob Bedore, a member of the West Jordan City Council. "Our city wants this very badly, but we keep coming up against data from UDOT saying it's not warranted. I think their data is flawed."

UDOT deputy director Lisa Wilson confirmed the department's position that additional signals and crossings are unwarranted on 9000 South, specifically at 1075 West/Hidden Peak Drive. But she said the department is committed to conducting an additional round of study after the widening project is completed and road traffic returns to its new normal with seven lanes.

She and Braceras argued that in some cases, adding a traffic signal or crosswalk can make a roadway less safe by impacting traffic congestion, as drivers are more prone to break the law, run red lights and engage in unsafe behavior to escape backups.

"A signal is not always the recommended solution," Wilson said. "We spend a lot of time looking at alternatives. We want to make sure they're safe, first and foremost."

But Rep. Ken Ivory, R-West Jordan, continued to press the issue. It was his motion to open a committee bill file—which could put legislation on an accelerated track heading into the winter's General Session—and he described how the intersection at 1075 W. 9000 South separates residents from schools, churches, other community destinations and each other.

Ivory said those dynamics add complexities that are not easily addressed by a formulaic evaluation of objective criteria, and he argued that UDOT should exercise a greater level of subjective judgement in its evaluation process and not rely solely on "hard and fast" data points.

"It's a very different situation than just a plain calculation of 'two plus two equals four'," Ivory said. "They're just living in fear. They've had accidents, they've had people killed, they've had people injured."

Any draft legislation created through the committee's bill file would be subject to additional debate and votes at interim hearings, followed by the typical process of the Legislature's 45-day General Session, which begins in January. And while the vote to open a bill file was unanimous, committee chairman Rep. Kay Christofferson expressed some reluctance to getting involved in the details of a specific roadway's configuration, suggesting it could lead to similar requests throughout the state.

"Every other intersection that has a concern, they're going to be wanting to come to the Legislature for a special change," he said.