Utah County roads - where are we?

PROVO — Two days as a pizza-delivery driver in Utah County was enough for Alicia Morris.

She didn't have a problem with the pay, the hours or the lingering smell of pizza in her car. It was the headaches that came from trying to navigate roads with numbering systems that change from one city to the next that last week prompted Morris' final delivery — this one to the store manager: I quit.

"It was just too stressful," she said.

Morris, 18, is new to Provo and unfamiliar with the area. To make things more difficult, she comes from Salt Lake County, where an established grid system lets motorists know where they are in proximity to downtown Salt Lake City.

"It's really confusing here," said Morris, who moved to Provo to go to college. "There's one Center Street here and another Center Street there. You have to say Provo Center Street and Orem Center Street."

Her advice: "Don't name them both Center Street."

Morris isn't alone in her frustrations with the multiple addressing systems in Utah County.

Shawn Eliot, a transportation planner with the Mountainland Association of Governments, said he's received plenty of calls and e-mails from Utah County residents asking if a Salt Lake County-like system could be implemented south of Point of the Mountain.

It's a question local transportation planners and city engineers have been working to answer for awhile, Eliot said. Those efforts recently got a boost from Utah County commissioners and local mayors who make up the Mountainland Metropolitan Planning Organization's regional planning committee.

All but one mayor — Goshen's Dorothy Sprague — voted in favor of having a technical advisory committee study options and estimate costs of implementing a countywide addressing system. The group is expected to report on its findings when the MPO meets in November.

Eliot, who presented the idea to the regional planning committee last week, said he was "taken aback" by the elected officials' overwhelming support for the idea.

"We're starting to grow up," he said. "At least from the mayors' point of view, we need to look at things regionally. That's not what has happened in the past. Every city was on its own."

That small-town thinking just doesn't work anymore, Eliot said. Utah County's population has topped 450,000, according to 2005 estimates by the U.S. Census Bureau, and city boundaries are becoming increasingly blurred by development.

"Our population in 2030 is supposed to go over 800,000," he said. "The way we're growing right now, it might be higher than that. It's only going to become harder and harder (to get around the county.)"

That raises concerns about public safety, Eliot said.