State, feds pumping brakes on transportation fast lane

SALT LAKE CITY — Utahns soon will learn their roads are no longer paved with gold.

Between 1998 and 2013, about $7 billion in state and federal money will have been spent building new highways or widening and improving existing thoroughfares.

That money is running out, which means instead of building new roadways to accommodate Utah's increasing population and traffic, transportation officials will be re-engineering them to reduce congestion.

Contrast the $139 million Innovate I-80 project that was completed in November — which increased freeway lanes in each direction to five and added 17 new bridges between State and 1300 East — to the reversible lanes the Utah Department of Transportation is installing at 5400 South between Redwood Road and Bangerter Highway.

To address heavy rush-hour traffic on 5400 South, UDOT is striping all the lanes white and will change the direction of traffic in the middle lanes throughout the day, using electronic signs to guide drivers. The middle lanes will be eastbound in the mornings and westbound in the afternoons. UDOT will call the reversible lanes "flex lanes."

Projects like Innovate 80 soon will be the past, and flex lanes will be the future.

"We won't be able to address huge-capacity projects like we have in the past," said John Njord, the department's executive director. "We won't have funds to do that sort of thing. We'll have to be more tactical in our approach to addressing congestion problems."

Njord distinguishes "surgical" or engineering tactics from "blunt force" tactics that involve massive rebuilding and widening.

"You don't buy any right of way; you don't pave any road," he said. "You just better utilize the surface that you have."

A history of highway building

With I-15 reconstruction in Salt Lake County, I-80 expansion and the creation of Legacy Parkway, the past decade in Utah has brought orange barrels and hundreds of miles of new travel lanes.

Last summer, UDOT paid out $3 million to contractors each calendar day, using state bonds and federal stimulus money.

"It was the biggest construction season ever in the history of the state," Njord said.

This summer is expected to be even bigger, as UDOT contractors work on the Mountain View Corridor and I-15 reconstruction in Utah County.