As time goes on and traffic congestion worsens, support for construction of the Legacy Parkway in southern Davis County continues to climb.

A recent Dan Jones & Associates opinion poll commissioned by the Deseret Morning News and KSL-TV found 63 percent of the 623 Utahns surveyed felt the Utah Department of Transportation should build the planned 14-mile, four-lane, limited-access highway. The poll, conducted Jan. 3-6, has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percent.

That approval rating is well above the 49 percent who supported construction of the road in a separate Dan Jones poll commissioned by the newspaper in October 2002. That survey was taken a month after the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver ordered UDOT to delay construction and revisit its environmental work on the project.

And in December 1998, another Dan Jones poll conducted for the newspaper showed only 43 percent of Utahns favored construction of the parkway.

Now, UDOT hopes it is just months away from receiving federal approval to build the highway. And, apparently, many commuters can't wait.

"It's pretty obvious to us that . . . as congestion continues to increase through the corridor, support for the project continues to rise. It seems like a pretty direct relationship to us," said UDOT spokesman Tom Hudachko.

UDOT officials have observed the same trend. They have hired Dan Jones & Associates to do three opinion surveys on the Legacy in the past five years. The most recent, released in late 2004, showed 86 percent of Weber and Davis county residents, and 63 percent of Salt Lake County residents, favored "the concept of the Legacy Highway through Salt Lake and Davis County."

In a 2002 UDOT poll, with the question worded the same way, 79 percent of Davis County residents and 54 percent of Salt Lake County residents favored the concept. Weber County residents were not polled that year.

In a 2001 UDOT poll, with the same question asked, 72 percent of Davis County residents and 49 percent of Salt Lake County residents supported the concept.

In the recent Deseret Morning News poll, residents were asked specifically, "Should the state go ahead with the building of the Legacy Parkway?" While the overall level of support was 63 percent, 88 percent of Davis County residents favored construction, 68 percent of Weber County residents liked the idea and 56 percent of Salt Lake County supported plans to build.

When compared to the most recent UDOT poll, the new Deseret Morning News poll shows an even higher level of support in Davis County but much less support in Weber and Salt Lake counties.

"There's somewhat of a discrepancy between the numbers there, and that could be the way the question is worded," Hudachko said. "But I think the message is still clear (in both polls). You've got a majority in all three of those counties of people who support that project, and you've got a supermajority in the county (Davis) that is impacted directly."