COLUMN: Legacy Highway must not happen
“Two roads diverged in a wood,” but the author could not discern where each would lead. As USU students, our road is somewhat better illuminated by others’ experience and our own intuition. However, we are often not in the driver’s seat, and we are we being whisked down a road both physical and metaphorical: the Legacy Highway.
This highway, proposed by Gov. Mike Leavitt and eagerly nurtured by the Utah Department of Transportation, would stretch 120 miles from Brigham City to Nephi. Much has been made of the highway’s planned corridor, which would demolish more than 100 acres of wetlands along the Great Salt Lake – vital in the western bird migration – and wipe out some of Utah’s most productive farmlands. But more significantly, the Legacy Highway would ensure the Wasatch Front’s acceleration into an abyss of suburban sprawl, loss of open space and air pollution. For this future, Utah taxpayers will shell out more than $300 million for just the first Davis County segment, with a total price tag in the billions, even as our schools rank last nationally in per-pupil spending.
Every metropolitan area that has built more highways in response to traffic congestion has been burned by ever-greater congestion, induced by both the urban growth that highways inevitably spawn and the “induced travel effect,” that new highways invite automobiles, and that has been documented around the country.
The mayor of Milwaukee aptly observed, “Building more roads to solve a traffic problem is like loosening your belt to solve a weight problem.”
UDOT has yet to learn this lesson, and has justified the Legacy Highway using traffic models inherently biased in favor of road construction and woefully limited in scope. UDOT perpetuates this hubris by claiming by purchasing and restoring wetlands elsewhere along the Great Salt Lake it is “mitigating” the damage, ignoring the unique importance of the wetlands in its crosshairs, the unproven track record of wetlands restoration in this country and the hydrological disruption the highway will create for wetlands throughout the corridor.
The highway is premised upon the false concept that government is a passive reactor to social trends – that its role is only to accommodate. In reality, urban planning and transportation design are intimately linked, and both must be forged into a collective vision, as Envision Utah and other groups are advocating. An alternative that focuses on commuter rail, carpooling and more compact growth along the I-15 corridor would be self-reinforcing and Davis, Salt Lake and Weber counties are well-positioned to explore this potential, with a quarter-cent sales tax dedicated to public transportation passed last November. Alternatively, Legacy Highway would crank up the treadmill of urban sprawl and highway construction, from which there is no return.
To avoid this fate, a diverse coalition of environmental groups, businesses, planners, physicians, hunters and farmers, as well as Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson have filed suit against the Federal Highway Administration and Army Corps of Engineers. The lawsuit blows the whistle on these agencies that violated environmental law by approving a project ill suited for the needs of the region and ignored alternatives based on mass transit and public transportation. I urge all USU students to donate to this effort (c/o Utahns for Better Transportation) and defend our communities against this prototypical pork-barrel boondoggle, designed by agencies that consider themselves so above the law contractors were selected before federal permits were even granted.
Jim Steitz is president of the Ecological Coalition of Students. Comments may be e-mailed to sl8mh@cc.usu.edu.