Utah Transportation Commission derails plan to extend S-Line Streetcar into Sugar House shopping center. 

click to enlarge

• Benjamin Wood
• Cyclists ride alongisde the S-Line Streetcar in Salt Lake City on March 5, 2025.

ROY—The Utah Transportation Commission showed little hesitation before approving roughly $3 billion in roadway expansion projects on Friday, posing virtually no questions to Utah Department of Transportation staff and limiting their comments to effusive praise for the necessary attention to driver bottlenecks.

But a few minutes later, facing a $9 million agenda item related to transit—specifically the long-planned extension of the S-Line Streetcar into the Sugar House strip-mall shopping cluster on Highland Drive—commissioners balked at the cost, demanding more information and at one point pulling up Google Maps to offer hypothetical realignments in real time, discarding years of delicate negotiations and planning in one of the single densest, congestion-prone and high-property-value locations in the Beehive State.

“On the S-Line, we’re only going like 300 or 400 feet?” said commissioner Kevin Van Tassell, a former Utah lawmaker who presumably drove to Friday’s meeting in Roy from his home in Vernal. “That seems like a lot of money.”

The project actually proposes an extension of roughly 1,500 feet (or a quarter mile), enough to take the streetcar from its current terminus at McClelland St., west of Highland Drive, and into the Sugar House shopping center, east of Highland Drive. While the scope might seem small to the uninitiated, it represents a significant milestone for the streetcar project—essentially completing its current eastward phase of work—with any hypothetical future expansion likely to route the service either north (toward the University of Utah), or south (toward Millcreek Common and Holladay).

During the public comment portion of Friday's meeting, Blake Thomas—a senior advisor to Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall—expressed the city administration's support for the S-Line plans and emphasized the streetcar's role in transforming what had long been a dilapidated and defunct rail corridor.

“We’ve already seen the incredible private investment that followed the construction of the S-Line,” Thomas said. “Extending the S-Line into the heart of the Sugar House Business District would build on that success.”

The project was also described as “putting the head on the body” by Lynn Jacobs, a Salt Lake City transportation manager who has overseen much of the recent redesign of Sugar House’s street grid configuration.

“Where we go from [Highland Drive] is still a little bit up in the air,” Jacobs said.

The S-Line extension project had already been approved in prior form by UDOT and the Utah Transportation Commission, but those plans would have stopped short of crossing Highland Drive. According to unverified reports, a recent change in mindset among the adjacent property ownership interests allowed the Utah Transit Authority to consider a superior design scheme, crossing Highland and entering into the shopping center itself, facilitating direct multi-modal connections to amenities like shopping, restaurants, a University of Utah Health clinic, assisted living facilities for seniors and green assets like Sugar House Park and Hidden Hollow.

But that change in scope necessitated a shift in funding for design and environmental review, which newly placed the matter before the Utah Transportation Commission on Friday. And after struggling to wrap their heads around the benefits of taking the streetcar to one of Salt Lake City's marquee destinations—in a place where residents and commercial patrons are less likely to rely on a private automobile—the commission instead voted to postpone consideration of the $9 million appropriation to a later date, likely in August due to a July gap in commission business.

The motion was initiated by Natalie Gochnour, who represents Salt Lake City and the urbanized Wasatch Front on the otherwise rural-dominated transportation commission.

“We have to know the long-term vision for these things, especially when we’re spending that much money,” Gochnour said, referring to the $9 million for transit improvement, not the $3 billion for driver convenience.

Gochnour did note that she does not want the delay to lead to increased costs or the ultimate loss of the extension project—though commission discussion acknowledged that potential outcome—and she stressed that the S-Line extension be placed on an agenda as soon as possible.

“I don’t know what the process is. If cost is an issue here, I would love for us to do a special [July] meeting on this issue,” she said. “I just don’t think we should do anything that increases the cost for the same thing.”

Asked for comment after the commission's vote, UTA spokesman Gavin Gustafson emphasized the estimated $2 billion in private investment at properties around the S-Line corridor since the launch of the streetcar, and a recent economic analysis that found every $1 invested in transit generates more than $5 in public benefit.

"The S-Line extension will provide a crucial connection for the Sugar House Shopping Center and new housing and business developments in that area to the Central Pointe Trax station," Gustafson said. "We look forward to the next opportunity to provide a clear picture of these transit benefits for the public to the Utah Transportation Commission."

The S-Line extension was debated by the UTA Board of Trustees earlier this week at their Wednesday meeting. Both UTA staff and board members expressed their hope and expectation that UDOT approval would go smoothly and allow the project to proceed.

“Obviously, this changes the dynamics of the design quite a bit,” UTA chairman Carlton Christensen said of pushing the streetcar across Highland Drive. “It will be great to see it go to this point.”

And at a prior meeting two weeks ago, the UTA trustees adopted a new design guidelines toolkit for the areas where transit functions best, describing exactly the scenario that the S-Line seeks to capitalize on by bringing highly efficient transportation into a high-density, high-demand area with walking and biking connections to other points in the city.

UTA staff were even asked by their board on Wednesday whether there was any sense of danger that Friday’s transportation commission vote would fail, to which a project manager noted that UDOT had been “very supportive” of the extension, to date.

“I just need to wait until Friday for formal approval,” he said.

That formal approval did not come. Josh Van Jura, UDOT’s Trails and Transit Director, made little effort to answer the commissioners' questions about the S-Line work, largely deferring to Jacobs, the city transportation employee. Both men struggled to convey the scope and aims of the project.

"I agree that it is a large amount of money," Van Jura responded at one point. "But moving the [streetcar's] endpoint actually is a more substantial change than you would think."

The lack of clarity seemingly prompted Ross Crowe, a member of UDOT’s right-of-way acquisition team, to divert from the agenda later in the meeting and circle back on the topic, personally noting the uniquely difficult and costly nature of building transportation infrastructure in an area like Sugar House.

“There is a relationship between the users and the building partners, and the surface area we have [available] to do something on,” Crowe said.