As a transportation planner, I work with a wide range of communities throughout the American West. Increasingly, the looming question for my clients is how to cure our addiction to automobiles as they recognize the toll automobiles have taken on our landscape. Especially in West—as I document in my book Ways to the West: How Getting Out of Our Cars Is Reclaiming America’s Frontier—dangerous roads, nowhere to walk, lack of public transit, and too much time in the car all point toward this big question. Communities are wondering how to trade the auto ecosystem—with its highways, parking fields, chain drive-through restaurants, and disconnected suburban neighborhoods—for the person ecosystem with its walkable streets, transportation choices, mass transit, unique public places, and diverse neighborhoods. To that end, I have worked on and witnessed big projects that replace highways and malls with Main Streets and plazas in sweeping gestures, instant cities manifested at a scale befitting of the West.
But more often this work comes down to lots of small yet difficult decisions. The auto ecosystem is so entrenched that altering it means cutting thousands of ties in the fields of not only engineering and city zoning codes but also real estate brokerage, finance, and even recreation. One changed policy or construction detail sends a ripple effect through a dozen others. Making these little changes correctly can add up over time and set the stage for bigger projects.
Over the last year, I’ve been working with many of the nearly 100 cities that make up the Wasatch Front region of Utah. The Wasatch Front, like the rest of the West, is struggling with the big question of how to move away from auto dominance. It has made some big investments, including nearly 150 miles of new urban rail projects.
But the future of the region will likely turn on the smaller conversations taking place throughout community development offices and city council chambers. In a Cottonwood Heights City Council meeting, as we proposed to reduce a five-lane 40-mph road to a three-lane street with a bike lane, one councillor pondered whether this was how they could emulate a popular walkable neighborhood of Salt Lake City. At the same time, North Salt Lake tries to figure out how to move more pedestrians across a state-controlled highway. Taylorsville searches for how a bus rapid transit project can be the pride of its community. Salt Lake County decides how to connect disparate segments of sidewalk into quality pedestrian routes. Ogden ponders mixing railcars and automobiles in its street lanes. Everyone is trying to figure out how to fit the twenty-six feet needed for light rail tracks into their formerly rural roads.
These details are the inner workings of a powerful and singular challenge. Sooner or later we will have to go from being a young American region to a mature one as we move from the relentless outward growth that built the West to the more thoughtful inward growth that will sustain it. Day by day, and lane by lane, we’re getting there.
Tim Sullivan is a city planner, urban designer, and writer whose professional focus is the reshaping of cities and communities through alternative transportation planning. He is the author of No Communication with the Sea: Searching for an Urban Future in the Great Basin. He lives in Salt Lake City with his wife and two children.
