ROY—The Utah Transportation Commission showed little hesitation before approving roughly $3 billion in roadway expansion projects on Friday, posing virtually no questions to Utah Department of Transportation staff and limiting their comments to effusive praise for the necessary attention to driver bottlenecks.

But a few minutes later, facing a $9 million agenda item related to transit—specifically the long-planned extension of the S-Line Streetcar into the Sugar House strip-mall shopping cluster on Highland Drive—commissioners balked at the cost, demanding more information and at one point pulling up Google Maps to offer hypothetical realignments in real time, discarding years of delicate negotiations and planning in one of the single densest, congestion-prone and high-property-value locations in the Beehive State.

“On the S-Line, we’re only going like 300 or 400 feet?” said commissioner Kevin Van Tassell, a former Utah lawmaker who presumably drove to Friday’s meeting in Roy from his home in Vernal. “That seems like a lot of money.”

The project actually proposes an extension of roughly 1,500 feet (or a quarter mile), enough to take the streetcar from its current terminus at McClelland St., west of Highland Drive, and into the Sugar House shopping center, east of Highland Drive.
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