Wasatch Front Metro Expansion
A BIG 'vision' for west of Utah Lake
by mstrwhew
Utah County » 'Vision' shows freeways, bridges for 500,000 people.
By Brandon Loomis
The Salt Lake Tribune
Goshen » It's all greasewood and jackrabbits out here on Utah County's
"back 40," a lonely and lovely retreat for the old-fangled cowboy.
That's today. Folks around here know it can't last, and now there's
color-coded evidence: a map that heralds the coming wave of
suburban buckaroos in split-level ranches.
Utah Lake's great beyond is about to land on a transportation plan
that rolls out freeways and bridges for an expected desert land
rush by 500,000 or more people over the next half-century.
"I guess I'll have to head to Wyoming or Montana next," ranch manager
Rich Fowler said last week while mending a barbed-wire fence next
to a stock pond. He saw urban sprawl munch farms and ranches in
California and Nevada before the cowboy want ads brought him here.
He knows his cows stand in a freeway's path.
Where most people see a placid reflection of Happy Valley on the
state's shallow freshwater sea, municipal planners see a chance to
cut and paste the civilized east shore onto the brushy west. If they're
right, the next generation in Utah's second-largest county will see
as many neighbors in the dry hills out west as currently gather
around Provo-Orem at the base of the Wasatch Mountains.
"This is really the only area in urban Utah that is undeveloped to
[this] degree," said Darrell Cook, chairman of metropolitan Utah
County's road-planning organization, Mountainland Association of Governments [MAG]. "We have, on a large scale, an opportunity
to do it right.
"That's a planner's dream."
]
Open space along Highway 89 west of Utah Lake
could become a fond memory. Municipal planners have big designs for
the area in the coming decades, including north-south freeways and
bridges across the lake to handle a population of 500,000. (Francisco Kjolseth / The Salt Lake Tribune)
Vision of growth » Doing it right, in MAG's nearly completed
"West Lake Vision" plan, means building two bridges across the
25-mile-long lake and wrapping a freeway from Saratoga Springs to
Eagle Mountain and south to Goshen, then east to Interstate 15.
A beltway farther west would traverse the Cedar Valley, and a grid of collector highways would carve the Goshen and Cedar valleys.
The plan that MAG adopts this fall will inform its next official long-term
roads funding list, set for review in 2011.
It's a vision that makes sprawl fighters sigh. Planting essentially a
second Happy Valley west of the lake and serving it with freeways
just ensures a future of more smog and particulate pollution from
people who have to drive long distances for everything, Sierra Club
regional representative Marc Heileson said.
While Salt Lake County and now even eastern Utah County have
embraced light rail, commuter rail and clustered denser developments
around mass transit, he said, spreading asphalt beyond the lake would
"undo everything good that's happening."
"It is a new definition for bad planning," Heileson said. "It's like all
the mistakes that Los Angeles and Phoenix made" rolled into this plan.
The Sierra Club also balks at the bridges, which Heileson said would
stir up pollutants from the muck and then add a steady stream of
motor oil from the cars passing over.
Heileson said he doesn't believe things will work out as MAG envisions.
Any increase in air pollution would cut off federal transportation funding
that the county desperately needs, he said.
Cook disagrees. Air pollution would be worse if more people stacked
up against the Wasatch's granite wall, he said. And besides the freeways,
he expects the Utah Transit Authority will extend its railways into the
virgin territory. He hopes for job centers and colleges to keep the new residents near home.
The plan doesn't specify where newcomers will get their water. MAG
doesn't predict exactly when all of this will happen, though Cook said
30 to 40 years is a fair estimate.
Cedar Valley, Beyond Eagle Mtn. and Saratoga Springs lies the next metro land rush
MMGoode
It's not going to be cheap.
"Billions, plural," Cook offers. It could cost the state $6 billion for
freeway construction alone, he said, not to mention engineering
miles-long bridges over the deep muck under the lake.
Compare that to the $1.7 billion that the Utah Department of
Transportation currently is spending to rebuild and widen I-15
past Provo.
"I really think [a West Lake highway system] will be the most
expensive expenditure the state will make over the next little
while," said Kent Millington, the Utah Transportation Commission
member who represents Utah County.
MAG's plan is important because it shows where the county, city
and state need to preserve highway rights of way against the
coming development, Millington said. And he believes it is coming
no matter what.
"If you look at what's happened just this decade in Eagle Mountain
and Saratoga Springs," he said, "that area has grown from a little
more than a few houses to 40,000 or 50,000 people out there."
qb_56
The growth of those bedroom communities off the lake's northwest
shore has paced Utah's nation-leading population surge lately.
Planners expect a similar swell to round the lake's south end through
pastoral Goshen when Payson and Santaquin build out.
The strands of big beige stucco homes now flowing into Eagle
Mountain hay fields in the north eventually could fill in the back
side of the Lake Mountains.
There will be affordable lots for countless happy families, said
Eagle Mountain Mayor Heather Jackson, one of the city's earliest
pioneers when she and her husband bought a home 11 years ago.
Eagle Mountain is planning for MAG's vision. Even before the
"West Lake" plan, the city was zoning corridors for freeways. MAG's
map now lines up two future freeways with those protected rights
of way. There's also an east-west swath for what MAG calls a
"Pony Express Parkway" from Saratoga Springs to Eagle Mountain,
harking to the cities' place on the short-lived Old West mail route.
She's eager to make room for neighbors, especially if it means
building the critical mass for freeways and bridges to shorten the
drive to Orem. What took 30 minutes a decade ago now takes an
hour, she said.
"It greatly affects the quality of life right now," Jackson said.
All these lines on the map have a different meaning to cowboy Fowler.
They signal the death of another cow town. Goshen remains a weedy checkerboard of gravel roads and horse trailers, where the locals
safely erect a home-painted "Kids at Play" sign on the shoulder
without attracting highway code enforcers.
"I think it sucks," he said, grinning to show tobacco-stained teeth
and shrugging at the inevitable.
"Strip malls. Highways. They'll do it all here. Everybody who buys
these condos thinks their food comes from a grocery store."
Transportation commissioner Millington sympathizes. He watched
Orem's growth squeeze out prized orchards. But farmers line up to
sell when the price is right, he said, and they always find a new
valley.
"I still buy plenty of apples," he said. "I used to buy them from Orem.
Now I get them from somewhere else."
West Lake Vision
» 500,000 people west of Utah Lake
» Two freeway loops
» Two lake spans
» Urban masses in the Cedar and Goshen valleys
West Lake Vision
500,000 people west of Utah Lake
Two freeway loops
Two lake spans
Urban masses in the Cedar and Goshen valleys
Mount Nebo as seen from the Goshen Valley
mstrwhew
Looking northeast from Goshen Valley
mstrwhew
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