Skip to main content

Salt Lake City Transit Projects Lauded

It's always nice to be recognized for good work (instead of, say, the worst air quality in the United States). It looks like Salt Lake has earned some of that recognition. From the Trib:

The Urban Land Institute and Ernst & Young released an annual report on Monday looking at how governments globally plan and build key infrastructure projects, and repeated warning of recent years that America is falling behind as budgets are cut in tough times.

But it added, “Despite fiscal constraints, Denver, Minneapolis-St. Paul and Salt Lake City have successfully moved projects forward” — and suggests that other areas look at how they did it.


And how did we do it?

In Utah, the study praised how cities, counties and planning agencies in the Salt Lake metro area backed the Utah Transit Authority’s expansion of its TRAX light rail and its FrontRunner commuter rail — including supporting voter approval of a sales tax increase to help fund them, and cutting bus service to afford expansion of rail as the recession cut sales-tax revenues.


The whole article is worth a read. It talks about the willingness of West Valley and other communities to eat the short-term cost of rail and infrastructure development by keeping an eye on future sustainable development and economic benefits. Sweet Moses, sometimes it really is that easy: think of the long-term, not just immediate, effects of policy and it becomes remarkable how clear your course of action is.

UPDATE: Whoa, we also were praised for Salt Lake's "all access" roads:

Salt Lake County’s rules for designing roads are among the nation’s best in providing access to all users: bicyclists, pedestrians and motorists alike.

So says the National Complete Streets Coalition, which ranked the county’s streets policy 15th in a recent report examining 200 such policies across the United States.


...so I take it this means people will stop freaking the hell out over the proposed multi-use green area at 2nd South and 11th East? No? Oh well.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Apparently, Liberals Are The Illuminati

posted 10/5/2012 by the Salt City Sinner Greetings, sheeple, from my stronghold high atop the Wells Fargo Building in downtown Salt City, where I type this before a massive, glowing bank of monitors that display the ongoing progress of my 23-point plan for complete social control. Whether you want to demonize me as a "liberal," or prefer the Glenn Beck update "progressive," we all know the truth, and it's time to pull the curtain aside: like all left-leaning persons, I am actually a member of the Illuminati. How else to explain how much power my side of the aisle wields in U.S. American politics? According to conservatives, liberals/the Illuminati control the media * , science * , academia in general * , public schools * , public radio * , pretty much anything "public," the courts * , and Hollywood * . Hell, we pretty much control everything except for scrappy, underdog operations like WND and Fox News, or quiet, marginalized voices like

The Garden Is Dead, Long Live The Garden

posted on 8/30/2015 by the Salt City Sinner  The last two times that I wrote about gardening, the tone was uncharacteristically less “playful whimsy” than “agonized demon howl.” This is with good reason. The cockroach-hearted fauxhemian Whole Foods crowd at Wasatch Community Gardens, you see, did a terrible thing to me and many other people – they decided that agreements are for suckers and that what the world really needs is another blighted patch of asphalt rather than a large and vibrant community garden, and so they killed my garden (and the gardens of many others) dead, dead, dead. Forgive my bitterness: there is something about loving a patch of actual soil, about nurturing life from tiny green shoots to a luxurious canopy of flowers and vegetables that brings out a protective streak in a human being, and also a ferocious loyalty. The destruction of Sugar House Community Garden did not, however, end my gardening career – heavens, no! Instead, I and a handful of

Cult Books: One Good, One Terrible

  I’ve finished writing a new novel (stay tuned for details) in which the massacre at Jonestown in November 1978 plays a pivotal role. Both to research it and because the phenomenon interests me, I’ve read more than a few books on cults and cultic ideology over the last year.