Megalopolis: Urban sprawl slowly blurs Wasatch Front towns, cities

It wasn't so long ago that Donald Frame used to ride a horse to get around his remote neighborhood in Taylorsville.

Leonard McKay lived in a tiny, distant Provo, and Michelle Knight's home in Clinton was surrounded by farmland, not strip malls and subdivisions.

But over the past few decades, Frame, McKay and Knight have been pulled ever closer — without moving an inch — into a booming metropolis or megalopolis, that spans the Wasatch Front. As their counties and communities collide, tiny towns are becoming more of a distant memory where new needs for establishing an identity, transportation routes and areas for growth have become paramount for survival.

"This is a whole different world we're living in," said Robert Lang, director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech, who is studying the Wasatch Front as one of the Intermountain West's five emerging "megapolitan" areas, where expanding commuting patterns make trends toward denser developments necessary and inevitable.

"The challenge for the Wasatch Front is using up its space inefficiently, using it for large subdivisions instead of being smart about how this shelf is being used. It's building a big transit structure and ... creating a strategy for where it will grow denser and where you would have neighborhoods of single-family homes."

The Wasatch Front, spanning from Logan to Provo, is ranked fourth in terms of size out of the five areas Lang is studying — Phoenix, Denver and Las Vegas are bigger; Albuquerque is smaller — but it is comparatively ahead of the region when it comes to light rail and mass transportation, Lang says.

Still, there are other areas where the Wasatch Front will need to adjust to keep up with its impending growth over the next 30 years, and not all of those changes are welcomed by long-term residents.

'All you see is houses'

As Provo — and all of Utah County — have grown up, and Salt Lake County has spread out, the sea of houses in commuter-heavy communities — half-suburb, half-country — now tumbles across the Wasatch Front into a constant flow of development.

But when McKay moved to Provo in 1935, the county seat was small, to say the least.

"It was like being in a don't-wink-blink-or-sneeze town or you'd miss the whole thing," said 77-year-old McKay, who serves on Provo's Planning Commission.