In a surprise amendment to a bill that quickly passed the Senate on Thursday, the Utah Senate moved to temporarily take away Salt Lake City’s authority to plan its own streets.
The bill, SB195, was amended shortly before passing the Senate and being sent to the House.
The current version of the bill includes a clear shot at Salt Lake City’s ability to design, engineer and build its own streets.
It also appears to require the Utah Department of Transportation to move ahead with plans construct the world’s longest gondola through Little Cottonwood Canyon.
The last-minute substitute, which did not receive a public hearing before passing the Senate, creates a sweeping moratorium on “any other strategy that when implemented may increase congestion for motor vehicles or discourage motor vehicles from driving on a particular” street.
The moratorium would last between May 7 and March 6, 2026.
The clause would effectively cripple the city’s ability to plan its own streets. Meanwhile, UDOT would be enlisted to conduct a “mobility and environmental impact analysis” study of the impacts of Salt Lake City’s street planning between 2015 and 2035.
Both UDOT and Salt Lake City would be required to report to the Legislature before the 2026 session about the effects of previous transportation planning efforts in the city.
It hamstrings Salt Lake City’s ongoing efforts to engage in both placemaking around Downtown and making its streets safer for people who drive, walk, bike, take transit, cross the street, push a stroller or otherwise exist.
The updated bill was such a surprise, it passed unanimously before Senate Democrats realized what was in the bill and updated their votes to nay.
That may be because Sen. Wayne Harper, R-Taylorsville, glossed over the details of his updated bill when presenting it for the first time on the Senate floor, two minutes before passage.
The bill, Harper said, “required [a] road study in cities of the first class dealing with some of the transportation issues.” He didn’t mention a moratorium or the fact that the bill applied only to Salt Lake City.
City officials didn’t immediately have a response on Friday, though they were meeting with members of leadership on Capitol Hill in the morning.
Salt Lake City has several ongoing policies that would be impacted by the bill, including its livable streets program, which seeks to make streets safer across the city. It also has a complete streets ordinance that requires the city to add space for all road users during a rebuild, though that ordinance was passed in 2010 and would be outside the scope of the study demanded by the bill.
In 2022, the city moved to lower its default posted speed limit to 20 mph.
It is also moving forward with plans to transform some of its streets surrounding Downtown into linear parks in a project called the Green Loop. Work has recently stalled on Salt Lake City’s efforts to pedestrianize Main Street through the heart of Downtown, which faced pushback from powerful interests including Zion’s Bank.
Because of the broad and unspecific language of the bill, SB195 is likely to block Salt Lake City’s Transportation Division from basically any significant street planning or construction without direct oversight from UDOT.
The bill’s Senate sponsor was Harper. Its House sponsor is Rep. Kay Christofferson, R-Lehi. Neither responded to a request for comment.
It’s possible the bill would be a temporary intrusion into the city’s street-planning power.
The study demanded of UDOT and Salt Lake City would look at the city’s impacts on “state highways, local highways, mobility, traffic flow, pedestrian and nonmotorized vehicle flow, the economy, public health, quality of life, air quality, maintenance, and operations.”
If the study is impartial, it would likely show that streets that aren’t as wide cost less to build and maintain, that complete streets are known to improve the local economy, that people die and are maimed less often on city-owned streets than on UDOT-owned roads, and that streets that aren’t designed solely for car travel improve the quality of life for local residents.
As for the gondola, the bill included a line that said that when UDOT constructs any project that requires an environmental impact statement, it “may only construct the project as provided in the record of decision.”
The record of decision for the gondola in Little Cottonwood Canyon was to build the gondola.
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