MONTICELLO - Cattle rancher Bruce Adams believes he and his neighbors in this small out-of-the-way town shouldn't have to suffer for the good of global trade.
But they do.
Every day as many as 800 huge trucks pass through the heart of Monticello's Main Street and ply U.S. Highways 491 and 191, two-lane country blacktops through San Juan County. The trucks are part of a startling proliferation of big rigs on the nation's highways that have become critical links of the roaring free-trade supply chains stretching from Canada to Mexico and Asia to the United States.
Those chains now run through the remotest corners of Utah, as Adams and his neighbors suffer the rumble and the dust of the hundreds of trucks and the rapid deterioration of Main Street and the highways that were neither envisioned nor engineered for heavy cargo.
"There is probably not a turnoff on this highway where there's not been a death or major injury. The highway is deteriorating," Adams, a first-term San Juan County commissioner, said of U.S. 491 a few weeks after he went to the Utah Transportation Commission looking for some help. "We're not going to get any less truck traffic."
Rural roads outside the Wasatch Front are pushed to the limit to serve global commerce. U.S. 6 from Price to Interstate 70, a leg of the Canada to Mexico route, is considered one of the nation's most dangerous highways for truckers and other motorists. Main streets in Kanab and Vernal are truck highways.
But narrow roads in urban areas also suffer damage from 18-wheelers. Along the northern stretch of 5600 West in Salt Lake City a huge warehouse freight area is springing out of bare ground at a feverish pace, promising to supply Utah and surrounding states with truck after truck of Asian goods from the clogged ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.
The pressure on roads and streets is approaching crisis, and it's not just asphalt damage. A National Academies of Science report released in January found that highway congestion each year costs Americans $65 billion and wastes 2.3 billion gallons of gasoline.
WHO PAYS?
Those costs ultimately will get passed through to taxpayers. So will the costs of fixing the roads that are breaking apart under the weight of the nation's consumer appetites.
Semitrailers, not cars, damage roads, and the trouble isn't just with country roads. Interstates show the hammering they've taken from freight movement, even though they were engineered to withstand the pounding. Utah's weather plays a part, too, the freeze-and-thaw cycles causing frost heaves and general asphalt deterioration.
The Utah Department of Transportation says the state faces $16.5 billion in unmet transportation needs, with maintenance accounting for about half the total.
"Our top priority is taking care of what we have," said Tracy Conti, UDOT operations engineer.
The annual cost of maintaining and upgrading the nation's highway system is reaching more than $100 billion annually, billions more than governments have invested. Meanwhile, deferred maintenance because of public resistance to increased taxes or user fees is causing a downward spiral that experts predict will lead to greater costs later on.
UTAH IN THE MIDDLE
Incredible as it may seem, on top of their regular supply schedules, manufacturers in Asia must gear up in the spring to ship goods to the United States for the Christmas season.
Ports are struggling to meet demand. Ships are hovering offshore, lining up to dock in Los Angeles and Long Beach, the nation's biggest port and the third largest in the world. Trains await, ready for the double or triple layers of shipping containers heading east. Semitrailer rigs fight for position on the freeways of the Los Angeles basin before heading to Ogden and Salt Lake City.
"Everything comes to Utah," says Daniel Kuhn, UDOT freight planner. "We really are the crossroads of the West, and one of the key crossroads of the United States."
In a long-term study for the state, Kuhn found that each year, more than 184 billion tons of freight valued at $97 billion moves through Utah via all modes of transportation, including rail and air. The amount carried by truck to Utah hasn't been quantified, he said.
According to the American Trucking Association, trucks hauled 9.8 billion tons of freight back and forth across the nation in 2004. By 2016, that total is expected to reach 13 billion tons.
Highways, railways and air freight facilities all are inadequate, Kuhn says.
SHORTEST ROUTES
Salt Lake City resident and trucker Steve Bocek was on his way to Coppell, Texas, with a load of medical supplies when his rig developed a problem. He stopped to fix it in the vacant lot next to a Shell gas station across Main Street from the Monticello truck port of entry at the intersection of U.S. 191 and U.S. 491.
"That short 18-mile stretch, it's pretty rough," Bocek said of the road to Colorado. His company steers him this way because it's the shortest route to Texas and the Southern states, he said.
Besides dealing with road damage, Monticello, population 1,940, is seeing unprecedented congestion. Semitrailers account for 48 percent of all traffic rolling through the San Juan County seat. UDOT statistics show 79,000 trucks passed through the port of entry on Monticello's Main Street in fiscal 2005.
But the port of entry isn't a round-the-clock operation. It's possible thousands of trucks aren't counted in Monticello or the rest of the ports.
MORE TO COME
Nationally, freight truck counts will increase 100 percent in 20 years, said Utah Trucking Association Executive Director Dave Creer, though a American Trucking Association spokesman said because of driver shortages, it can't predict the growth in trucks on the nation's roads.
Utah will endure even larger increases on Interstate 15 due to the North American Free Trade Agreement. The emergence of China and India as major trading partners will only increase pressure on an already burdened system.
Spotting opportunity, rail companies have stepped into the breach.
Union Pacific Railroad in January opened a 260-acre, $100 million intermodal freight center on 5600 West at 900 South in the already humming northwest industrial quadrant of Salt Lake County. The railroad's goal is to take advantage of backlogs at West Coast ports by offering shipping customers a way to leapfrog the traffic congestion and reduce costs.
At the ports, cranes lift shipping containers onto UP rail cars that then avoid California traffic gridlock and travel to Salt Lake City and similar yards in the Midwest. UP promises its Salt Lake City operation will get containers from trains to trucks in 90 seconds or less. The railroad says the national average for such operations is four minutes.
That doesn't sound like much of a difference, but saving 2 1/2 minutes is "huge," Creer said. "It's so precise. There's no delay."
SPECULATION
The UP center appears to be feeding interest in speculative investment in the remaining open ground along 5600 West between 2100 South and Interstate 80. Developers are building enormous warehouses nearby, perhaps hoping to catch the wave of freight traffic that will wash over the capital city.
"It's the biggest thing to happen to Salt Lake in a long time," said Bill Martin, a principal with Commerce CRG, a commercial real estate firm in Salt Lake City. "This is a futuristic move."
None of the interested parties, however, was willing to venture a guess on how much the truck traffic might increase with the development riding on 5600 West, never intended for its current heavy traffic. Creer called the street "a quagmire of trucks."
UDOT spokesman Tom Hudachko said the agency is trying to round up $1 million for an environmental analysis of 5600 West, as well as more money for new signals, lighting, passing and turn lanes.
Wal-Mart already has built a massive distribution center on 5600 West, and Costco is building one north of I-80. Pre-cast concrete buildings that can be built in four months are appearing on the landscape. They will be centers called "cross-docks" because they receive shipping containers on one side and repackage them for delivery rigs waiting on the other side.
The docks are a crucial component of a freight movement system known as "just-in-time," a complex computer inventory management mode that tracks retailers' needs down to the last pair of pink tennis shoes, delivering them on a schedule that avoids accumulating unneeded inventory. That means trucks and the nation's highways now serve as warehouses for retail giants.
Costco's 300,000-square-foot operation isn't dependent on the UP yard, said Jim Sinegal, Costco president and CEO. But like other companies that will use the rail complex, Costco's operation is all about lowering the net cost of getting merchandise to stores in the interior West.
Sinegal said a pallet won't sit in Costco's cross-dock more than six or seven hours.
On the Wasatch Front, the planned 35-mile Mountain View Corridor from Salt Lake City International Airport to Pleasant Grove may be built along 5800 West, which could provide truckers with a better alternative than 5600 West. But lawmakers are talking about making Mountain View the state's first public tollway instead of a freeway. If that happens, Creer says, truckers won't use it.
"This is an additional cost on top of the taxes they're already paying," Creer said. "They will use secondary roads rather than pay a toll."
RURAL DILEMMA
Driving U.S. 491 in San Juan County a few weeks after his Salt Lake City visit, Adams pointed out the many unprotected turnoffs onto dirt and paved roads where people live with their families, where school buses have to turn, where residents panic when big interstate rigs going faster than the 55 mph limit ride their bumpers on their trips to Cortez, Colo.
Adams understands his hometown is just a tiny bump in the road of globalization. His neighbors and constituents drive to Cortez to shop at the big-box stores. So Monticello needs the trucks, too.
But U.S. 491, an 18-mile stretch that connects Monticello with Colorado, isn't safe, he says. That's why he traveled to Salt Lake City to ask that improvements be funded.
Adams was dismayed, however, to discover the plans for U.S. 491 didn't include turn lanes or passing lanes, not even for the turnout that will connect the highway with a new copper mine. Nor were there plans to widen the 3-foot-wide shoulders that now slope gently into ditches, making it impossible for a semitrailer to pull off the road.
Adams took great care not to criticize UDOT for not moving faster with its plans, saying San Juan County may be to blame, too, for not contributing more. Pointing out the hazards while driving a visitor to the Colorado line and back, Adams said the county is trying to help with the road improvements.
"But I don't think we'll ever have major money spent on this project," he said.
"
Everything comes to Utah. We really are the crossroads of the West, and one of the key crossroads of the United States."
DANIEL KUHN, UDOT FREIGHT PLANNER
DRIVEN TO THE LIMIT
