Freeway Seems Likely, But Residents Cry For Transit

"Clean-air activists on Wednesday begged state transportation planners to try running mass transit up and down the western Salt Lake Valley before building an eight-lane Mountain View freeway in the area."

"But West Valley residents at the state's freeway plan open house did say that traffic is bad enough already to justify the freeway."

"Others said it doesn't have to be that way if the Utah Department of Transportation would just wait for light rail or another mass transit line to serve north-south travelers in the western valley."

"Utah's transportation planners have repeatedly underestimated ridership that new mass transit projects will attract, said Marc Heileson of the Sierra Club. They've done it again here, he argued, by calculating that such a rail line wouldn't do much better than half the 20,000 riders that the Sandy-Salt Lake City TRAX line attracted when it opened in 1999. The low expectations come despite assumptions of denser west-valley development by 2030 and the prior construction of rail spokes to South Jordan and West Valley City."

"Meanwhile, the proposed freeway would run within a half-mile of 21 schools, and directly through school property in two cases."