5600 West being prioritized to relieve northbound traffic

The city is hoping to complete and widen 5600 West through the entire length of the city to relieve northbound traffic, before having to wait for the completion of the Mountain View Corridor to 2100 South.

The Mountain View Corridor, when completed up to 5400 South in Dec. 2012, will relieve southbound traffic, but will leave a hole for northbound traffic until the legislature funds the final length from 5400 South onto 2100 South, which is expected in the next five years.

“You will be able to go south but you won’t be able to go north,” Mayor Johnson said at the Nov. 10 town hall meeting. “So the city, to compensate for that, is building and widening 5600 West.”

Currently, 5600 West does not run through the entire city, stopping between 7000 South and 7800 South.

“So we’re in the process right now of acquiring the property and putting together the funding to complete that road,” Johnson said.

Next year, the city will widen the section between 7000 South and 6200 South to remove the narrowing and make it uniformly wide throughout.

“If we can get the funding soon enough to do that, then [the Utah Transit Authority] is talking about the potential of bringing the bus rapid transit all the way to 7000 South, instead of stopping it at 6200 South. So we would have bus rapid transit going through there as well,” Johnson said.

Johnson has been working with the county and the Utah Council of Governments, a group of mayors from cities throughout the county.

“With the last round of applications, I was able to get us about $600,000 to buy property between 7000 and 7800 South,” Johnson said. “We still need more, and every six months I go back to those meetings and I fight for us to get more money to buy more pieces of property. It's kind of piecemeal. I figure we have a year and a half to get the property acquired before we’ll actually have to start doing anything with it.”