Transportation plan is vital, Envision Utah stresses

Robert Grow, founding chairman of Envision Utah, knows people tend to make decisions based on the facts available to them.

That may be one reason, he theorizes, why Utahns and their local leaders have been making decisions about growth, transportation and affordable housing that may not, in the long run, be to their benefit.

While he is careful to point out Envision Utah is a nonprofit, educational organization, the information Grow and his peers are spreading throughout the Wasatch Front could have a significant impact on future choices made by voters and politicians alike.

Grow, for example, is pretty sure most Utahns don't realize just how congested their roads will become if the state does not make a significant investment in transportation by 2030, including some major transit improvements within the next 10 years.

If the Wasatch Front Regional Council's 30-year transportation plan — which includes a rail and rapid-transit network of almost 300 miles — is followed and built, the average Wasatch Front resident will spend 33 hours a year stuck in traffic, in congestion-related delay. But if that plan is not followed, the total increases to 68 hours of delay each year, he said.

"This is all about how much time we're going to be sitting in traffic vs. eating dinner with our children," Grow said Thursday in a meeting with the Deseret Morning New editorial board.

"We in Utah, like most places in the country, have allowed our transportation infrastructure to lag . . . so the transportation system gets worse and worse. We're going to have to make up some of that ground."

Grow is well aware many drivers will simply refuse to get out of their cars and take public transit, and he doesn't expect them all to do so. The key to making public transit a success, he said, is to coordinate it with local zoning, affordable housing and development strategies so that the residential population is concentrated within easy access to transit.

He said there are 80,000 acres of land in urban Utah located within a half mile — or 1,000 steps — of existing or planned transit systems. If local zoning were to allow for higher density along those routes, as many as 320,000 homes could be located within those 1,000 steps of transit. And if an average of three people lived in each of those households, nearly a million people would live within easy access to public transit, he said.

And while that doesn't mean a majority of those residents would use public transit to commute, the overall transportation system would benefit if only a relatively small percentage did so.