As part of Mountainlands Association of Governments’ initiative to take advantage of federal grants offered to make roads safer in Utah, Wasatch and Summit counties, the coalition held an open house with Wasatch County residents last week.
While the association has completed a safety action plan for the three counties and is working to implement the project, project manager Charles Allen explained it also hopes to help communities use the hundreds of millions of dollars the federal government is offering to communities in grants to complete other transportation-safety related projects.
“We want to help communities to be prepared to pursue implementation grant money as soon as possible,” he said. “We want to identify these sets or packages of projects that can be ready for submission.”
To help identify dangerous areas that can be addressed and to illustrate hazardous components that can potentially be reduced in Wasatch County, the association of governments provided information about past collisions in Wasatch County.
Jen Schriber explained that — without counting those that took place on interstates — roughly 3,700 collisions have happened in the area from 2018-2022. About 1% were deadly and 5% left people seriously injured.
Twenty of the collisions involved pedestrians, and seven left someone dead or seriously hurt. The other 24 involved people traveling with vehicles like bicycles, and two of the occurrences proved critical or severe.
A search for areas with high accident frequency led the association of governments to identify that in general, collisions are likely to take place in the more developed municipalities in Heber Valley, severe accidents often happen on South Main Street and S.R. 189, and pedestrians and bicyclists are most likely to be hit at South Main and Center Street.
“This doesn’t mean these are the only locations where crashes are occurring,” Schriber said, “but really the hottest of the hotspots.”
In unincorporated Wasatch County, the three hotspots for all collisions, severe crashes and incidents involving cyclists and pedestrians were U.S. Route 189, S.R. 35 and both U.S. Route 189 and S.R. 248, respectively.
Project planner Stacee Adams explained that public involvement is important in determining what improvements can be made to make Wasatch County a safer place to travel, though somewhat difficult to ascertain while the projects are yet to be set in stone. MAG has asked pedestrians in Heber City for their thoughts on which roadways are potentially dangerous for those traveling by foot, and there’s a survey available at mountainlandsafestreet.org.
She encouraged people to share their worries while driving in Wasatch County — whether they are construction sites, particular intersections or idiots behind the wheel.
“We want to know what kind of behaviors make you concerned when you’re driving,” Adams said.
The survey will be available until Dec. 20.
This spring, there will be more public events where individuals will have the opportunity to comment on project possibilities.
“We don’t necessarily want to force feed a specific type of project to any of the communities,” Senior Transportation Planner & Program Manager Robert Allen said. “We’ll be working closely with each of the communities and [the Utah Department of Transportation.]”