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Lehi, UDOT compromise on corridor

You people aren't listening. We want our road and we want it now! What the people of Lehi want for their community is not relevent.

Emory, how in the world can you be so insensitive??? Apparently we should just forget about using our Main Street and not build any more roads. That would really help the value of any house west of Lehi since Traffic would be awful. You should be grateful that pioneering people in Lehi made it so you could own a house and live the American dream!

It makes me feel ashamed to think that people like you are speeding through my town, probably littering, honking at and tailgating old men on tractors since they're keeping you from speeding through town. Get real and become a member of the North County community. We're all here, in this together. Get over yourself!

Good job Mayor Johnson. This is a good compromise.

The road interests would rather you didn't know that Vehicle Miles Traveled in the US did not grow in 2006 over 2005, dropped in 2007 over 2006, and are on track to drop by an unprecedented amount in 2008 over 2007. We are at the beginning of a long and painful seperation between ourselves and our beloved cars, due to the difficulty we will have continuing to fuel them.
Exurban growth is going to grind to a halt as we once again move closer to our jobs. Those that remain in the exurbs will improvise carpools and use whatever public transit is available no matter how inconvenient. The existing roads will once again seem spacious to those who can still afford to use them and further capacity expansion will be abandoned as pointless.
This "scaling back" of Mountain View Corridor is the first of many abandoned road plans to come.

Maintaining the status quo is detrimental to your residents.

I'd be willing to bet (if it were legal in Utah), that before phase 1 is complete, traffic demand will require UDOT to construct phase 3, totally skipping phase 2.

BTW - What does all this "phasing" do to the ultimate cost of the project?

I'm willing to bet against you. It would probably be legal to have a neutral third party hold the funds and donate them to the charity of the winner's choice.
There will be no phase 2. There may not even be a phase 1, for the reasons I described above.

-lowonoil

to Iowonoil: Even if your basic assumption proves out in the short term, in the long term other means of personal transportation will come along that will again make use of the roads you so despise.

Whether it is hybrids, electric, hydrogen, or something not even dreamed up yet, there is no future without cars in America, because in a free market there will always be incentive for innovation to produce the products that people want to buy. Gasoline powered or not, the cars will come.

Z: Cars require a whole lot of energy, regardless of what that form of energy is. We also have a lot of other things that require a whole lot of energy, such as food production, distribution, and refrigeration, home heating and cooling, water treatment and delivery systems, sanitation systems, garbage collection, schools, hospitals, manufacturing and distribution of goods, etc., etc.

In an energy depleted future when we have to make hard choices of where to spend our limited amounts of energy, which of the above shall we give up in order for everyone to keep driving?

First of all, I like public transportation, if you can do it right. Look at Japan, it is easier to get around in a lot of places without a car than it is with a car. As the world becomes more populated, I would think things would go in this direction. Even if some technology comes along and replaces the way cars run, there will be similar technology developments for mass transit. With cell phones, laptops, wifi and mobile internet(and maybe dramamine if you need it), you're no longer wasting time as much when you are traveling and I think people will start to realize that public transportation can be more productive, if not faster, than cars. I can get 50 mins of work done each way instead of listening to 30 mins of music/talk radio.

Second, I'm happy to see Lehi and UDOT finding some common ground. I was getting the feeling that UDOT had its plan and was just going through the motions to get it done. I think this is great, and I think that it will give us a quicker solution to getting out west. Then we can phase things in when needed.

As much as I'm for not causing pain to a community, the longer this road waits the more pain will come later in poor traffic and more residents to be affected with future "phases". Frankly, I think the citizens of Lehi are in a tough spot, but should get over themselves and realize the rest of the county and region should have higher priority. Their pride and fighting is only going to make the situation worse. The road is needed now and by the time it gets built it will be late. Doing phases with standard roads and traffic lights won't help the fact that Saratoga, Eagle Mountain, and Cedar Valley need a solution ASAP despite farmers and residents in Lehi. UDOT should just push forward, too many residents complaints are just adding to the excessive time it already takes for environmentalists to where we'll never see the road needed to alleviate today's traffic troubles.