To do any less would have been a betrayal of the voters. Thankfully, local mayors and the County Council - most of them, anyway - understood that, and put the West Valley City and West Jordan/South Jordan TRAX lines at the top of the list. They put FrontRunner commuter rail through Salt Lake County second. And they threw a few crumbs at rebuilding I-80 between I-15 and 1300 East in Salt Lake City.

The Utah Transit Authority honchos also assured the assembled poohbahs that the Airport and Draper TRAX lines also can be built on an accelerated schedule with funds generated by an earlier quarter-cent tax increase enacted in 2000.

Bottom line: Voters should get the rail transit projects they elected to fund. This integrated rail transit system should reduce local dependence on the automobile, cut road congestion and improve air quality.

As population growth and residential development devour southern and western Salt Lake County, as more people are crowded into the land and air in this mountain-ringed bowl we call the Great Basin, Tuesday's decision will loom increasingly large as a watershed event in Utah's history.

It is worthwhile to note how we got here. A county property-tax proposal to bond for $895 million to build the four TRAX lines sooner morphed into a sales-tax plan when business owners shrieked about a property-tax hike. The Legislature insisted that 25 percent of the sales-tax plan go to buy right of way for the Mountain View corridor, and also stacked the deck in favor of commuter rail.

The resulting compromise is a regional system that will link Salt Lake County internally and to Utah and Davis counties. The Legislature should reward Salt Lake County taxpayers, who are funding this system, by allocating freed-up state road funds to build the east-west routes critical to western Salt Lake County.

The political journey has been ugly, but the destination looks beautiful.