Co2 salt lake city trax8/3/2023 ![]() The city is counting on a new pass that lets people ride any of the region’s light-rail, commuter-rail or streetcar lines for $30 a month to bolster the trend. TRAX ridership increased 7% last year, to more than 50,000 a day. Since 2008, the state has laid 70 miles of track–under budget and two years ahead of schedule. Light rail and commuter rail, meanwhile, are booming. Four heavily trafficked streets have recently been redesigned with separate lanes for bikes and pedestrians, with two more coming this summer. Figuring out how to get those residents to and from work without the highway gridlock typical of Western cities led civic leaders to embrace commuting alternatives normally found in cities 10 times larger.Ĭonsider: That paltry bike budget has grown to $2 million as Salt Lake added a popular bike-share program. About 1.2 million people live in the Salt Lake metropolitan area, 190,000 in the city core, and the population is expected to double by 2050, according to demographers. In 2007, Salt Lake’s bike-lane budget was $50,000. Light rail didn’t connect the growing neighborhoods within those cities. Fifteen years ago, no commuter rail linked Salt Lake with nearby Ogden or Provo. That change looks daunting: cars have been the main way to get around Salt Lake and the Wasatch Front region since they replaced the horse and buggy. “We’ve got to change the mind-set here,” Hutcheson says as we wait to catch the 209 bus on a recent weekday morning. ![]() “I’ve done the calculations, and it’s still cheaper to drive,” she says.Ĭonvincing Saldanha and other Utah urbanites otherwise is the job of Robin Hutcheson, Salt Lake’s head of transportation, who as you might expect often uses public transit to get to work. But when Saldanha, 26, visits family in Provo, about 45 miles south, she bypasses the commuter-rail link between the two cities and takes her car. It’s easier to hop on and off than to drive, and parking tickets aren’t a concern. Tricia Saldanha lives in downtown Salt Lake City and often takes TRAX–the city’s light-rail line–to go shopping or run errands.
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