A state-mandated report on Salt Lake City’s projects aimed at slowing car traffic found they had little to no effect on crashes or vehicular mobility.
It did ding the city, however, for partial engagement efforts, negative impacts on emergency medical services, and lacking protections for businesses during construction.
The study, undertaken by the Utah Department of Transportation, was required as a part of the controversial SB195, which gave the agency some veto power over the capital’s traffic-calming projects — like center median parking on 900 South or the new double-track bike lane on 300 West.
In the report, UDOT also said the city should refrain from trying to calm traffic on so-called Tier 1 roads, like State Street and 700 East, that are often used by commuters heading into the capital.
UDOT Executive Director Carlos Braceras told lawmakers at an October transportation committee meeting that the agency “would recommend” that those routes “be preserved for vehicle capacity access” and no reconstruction projects should reduce their ability to carry as many cars as they do now.
Mayor Erin Mendenhall told lawmakers the city agrees that changes need to be made.
The report was required as a part of a larger transportation bill that also touched on issues like wrong-way driving and funding for projects elsewhere in the state. The measure was the subject of much debate, and lawmakers went back and forth on how much of a role they thought UDOT should play in regulating the city’s road projects before passing it.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) A cyclist uses the bike lane along 300 West in Salt Lake City. (Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Scooters and bicyclists ride the bike trail along 900 South in the fall. The state has released a study of Salt Lake City's traffic-calming projects.
State officials used traffic and stoplight data to gauge how the changes affected motorists on 13 routes that had already seen construction and to forecast how 15 future projects might impact those corridors. UDOT also took qualitative feedback from businesses and government institutions on how the reconstruction had hurt or helped them.
Overall, the state found mostly neutral or minimal impacts to the city’s grid and traffic flow in the study area: a rough polygon formed by Foothill Drive, 1300 East, 600 North, Interstate 15 and 2100 South. There were some differing — positive and negative — effects related to individual projects, like less car mobility on 900 South and increased active transportation use on 200 South.
The study did relay other negative impacts, though. It found that the changes had required EMS providers to deploy additional ambulances and resources to keep up its response times. Officials also said the projects had made it harder for other city departments to maintain roads and provide services like snow removal.
“Even starting from a biased towards car-traffic perspective in terms of the survey phrasing and metrics used by UDOT,” Sweet Streets, an active transportation advocacy group, wrote in a blog post, “the main takeaway from the summary and UDOT Director Carlos Braceras’ presentation was that the street design changes had minimal impact on travel time, and that traffic signal timing was a more important factor (as we’ve previously suggested).”
UDOT asked the city to consider changes to its policies in the report. Specifically, the department encouraged the city to improve how it operates its streets, including updating the timing on traffic signals, and how it informs and takes feedback from those who might use a redesigned road.
The study criticized City Hall for not including community voices in project design and asked that it try to communicate better across government agencies and utilities.
“Salt Lake City is in agreement with everything in [Braceras’] presentation,” Mendenhall said in October. “We see, thanks to the SB195 process, great areas for improvement, both in the engagement portion of our planning prior to doing a project, during the construction of projects and afterward as we collect the impacts and find out whether or not the goals we had set out in those transportation projects were achieved.”
In her formal response to the UDOT study, Mendenhall said officials would make changes to how it manages transportation projects. She promised the city would optimize its parking, double down on its efforts to take feedback, better coordinate projects, work with UDOT on signal timing and mitigate the effects of construction by holding contractors more accountable.
The mayor also said the city planned to adopt UDOT’s Tier 1 designations and the policy restricting changes to them.
“I would prefer, as someone who lives in the city every day, that those roads not be completely frozen in amber even if we are to preserve their capacity,” resident Kyle Holland said at a November committee meeting. “... We can have our capacity, we can have our safety, but we can’t freeze these Tier 1 roads in amber.”
Holland asked that the final policy still allow for changes to lane widths, shoulder striping and visibility improvements for pedestrians on the large streets. He mentioned that at least five people had been killed in accidents on Tier 1 roads this year.
The city is finalizing its own mobility plan, which UDOT will have to approve. That document will lay out the city’s future traffic-calming plans in the study area.