Bluffdale • Residents in the southwestern suburbs of Salt Lake County currently have few useful public transit options.
A new bus route links the TRAX Red Line’s Daybreak Parkway station to the Blue Line’s Draper Town Center platform, running through Herriman and Riverton on its way. Another bus connects the center of Bluffdale to the South Jordan FrontRunner stop and the Blue Line’s Sandy Civic Center station.
But those bus lines run once an hour, leaving residents with few opportunities to use them. To fill in the gaps, the Utah Transit Authority also runs an on-demand shuttle service in the area.
A new plan in motion, however, aims to make scooting through the suburbs a little easier.
In presentations delivered to the Bluffdale City Council this week, the Utah Department of Transportation and Wasatch Front Regional Council previewed vast network upgrades — both imminent and in the planning stages — to the suburbs.
A new FrontRunner station
As a part of the long-planned UDOT project to add more two-way tracking to the FrontRunner commuter train service, Bluffdale will get its own station between Draper and Lehi. The double tracks — which will be installed where possible in sections along the line from Ogden to Provo — are set to cut down headways from 30 minutes to 15 minutes at peak times.
“Congestion on [Interstate]-15 is not getting any better,” UDOT Transit Project Director Brian Allen told council members. “As we look at the [regional transportation plan] and the regional models, it’s only going to get worse, especially in this southern portion [of Salt Lake County]. So, by 2050, FrontRunner will be about 20% faster than taking I-15.”
Allen said UDOT has finalized the location of the Bluffdale station: It will sit in the city’s northeast corner, bordering the massive Legislature-backed planned development at The Point. The platform will be built just south of Bangerter Highway and north of 14600 South, a main thoroughfare into the suburb, near a commercial development that includes a new indoor beach volleyball facility and bar called SandBar.
The stop will abut a small neighborhood and Phillip Gates Memorial Park on its west side.
Otherwise, though, it’s at least a 30-minute walk from the suburb’s commercial and residential centers to the west, as well as its denser Independence neighborhood to the south.
“This is not the best location for Bluffdale,” council member Wendy Aston said. “...Why does it have to be right here? Why can’t it be farther south where we would prefer it?”
Allen responded that UDOT wants to serve future residents and workers at The Point.
“Transit is more successful when you put it next to the high-density areas,” Allen said. “People can live and walk in the same area. So, with the Point of the Mountain being developed into what I’d call a high-density area, this station, we feel like, will be well-used with that development moving forward.”
Other council members asked Allen about neighbors’ privacy and noise concerns. He confirmed that, given the space between the tracks and homes, a noise wall was not required under federal law and that UDOT did not plan to build one. He did commit to the agency planting trees that would help screen the neighborhood from the station.
If the city did want to build a noise or privacy wall, Allen said it would cost between $1.5 million and $4.5 million, a significant expense for Bluffdale, which runs an annual budget of about $16 million.
Allen told council members that the agency is finalizing its design for the two-story station — the parking lot for the stop would lie on the east side of a pair of Union Pacific tracks, requiring a pedestrian bridge to the passenger platform to the west — and aims to start construction next year. The plan is for residents to be able to hop on a train there in 2030.
Expanding the suburban transit web
Other transit upgrades are likely farther off in future but are under consideration by a group of southern Salt Lake County and northern Utah County cities. Later in the evening, the Bluffdale council heard an update from Wasatch Front Regional Council deputy director Ted Knowlton about possible plans to build a trio of new rapid transit routes through the suburb.
“The transit plan in the southwestern part of Salt Lake County has left a lot of people asking the question, ‘Can’t we do better?’ frankly,” Knowlton said. “Part of the reason that we don’t have more and better transit options on the plans is that it takes a concerted, collaborative effort to get projects done that are a little bit outside of the box.”
Knowlton presented a draft vision of future rapid transit corridors in the area to council members. It included an extension of the TRAX Red Line roughly along Bangerter Highway from Daybreak Parkway Station to the new Bluffdale FrontRunner stop. Knowlton said the proposal would connect Daybreak and The Point — two “major urban centers” — and “complete the network” in the southwestern part of the valley.
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Riders enter and exit a TRAX Red Line train at Daybreak Parkway Station in South Jordan on Wednesday, Nov. 12, 2025.
The study, called the 2024 Transit Fresh Look, also contemplates building two new bus rapid transit lines — like the Utah Valley Express or the Ogden Express — along Porter Rockwell Boulevard and Redwood Road. Transit officials have referred to the service as “light rail on rubber tires.”
“We’ve talked about a potential station for bus rapid transit at Porter Rockwell and Redwood,” Mayor Natalie Hall said, “because, again, as council member [Traci] Crockett was saying, we’ve got to get people in and out of Utah County, in and out of Salt Lake County, back and forth, out of Herriman west-east. So, that is an area we would say, ‘Yes, we support a station for bus rapid transit at this location, we think it’s a great idea.’”
Outside of Bluffdale, the draft proposal notes two additional light rail routes running east-west in northern Utah County — one from Eagle Mountain running mostly along Pioneer Crossing and another from Saratoga Springs running slightly south nearer to Pony Express Parkway. Both would link to the Lehi FrontRunner station. The plan also highlights three other possible rapid bus lines, including along Mountain View Corridor and South Jordan Parkway.
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) A TRAX Red Line train pulls into Daybreak Parkway Station in South Jordan on Wednesday, Nov. 12, 2025.
The presentation slides did not include the previously promised TRAX Blue Line extension from Draper into Lehi.
The study is due to wrap up next month, Knowlton said, with a goal of coalescing cities around a robust proposal to deepen public transit in the region.
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