Salt Lake Transit News Thread

[Hatman]

I had no idea there was even any demand from developers to build more transit-friendly developments along 5600W. The fact that gateway-style developments were even proposed is very interesting. I like Future Mayor's idea of creating a binding agreement to change the zoning along 5600 W when the BRT line is built. Maybe make it into a Public Private Partnership from the beginning and get some firm commitments from interested developers to ensure that transit-friendly developments actually do occur. It is no good to just build a transit line through a town and just hope for the best. "Build it and they will come" is not always true, especially for a transit route that has very little merit on its own besides being a freeway mitigation project.

A quick look at the current design of 5600 West shows that it has two lanes in each direction, a wide center median, and two generous shoulders on both sides. It seems to me that a design similar to what will be built down University Avenue in Provo would be a good example of how BRT will change a street like that. The center median will be replaced with bus lanes; the two traffic lanes on each side will be pushed closer to the edge of the road, and the wide shoulders will become narrow unprotected bike lanes. In locations where there is a station or an intersection with a turn lane, the road will need to be widened. But at other less traffic-heavy intersections, the center curb will continue through the intersection, eliminating left turn lanes on 5600W and changing the minor street to right-turns-only. Probably, if it follows the same design cues as the Provo line.
This could be done without widening the road for the majority of the BRT route. So from a strictly traffic engineering point of view, there aren't any fatal flaws in the design. But if the cities want to follow Orem's BRT arrangement on University Parkway (or even 400S in Salt Lake City) and widen to three lanes in each direction plus BRT lanes, then we've got some serious problems.