High Valley Transit is entering the next phase of construction on S.R. 224 for its bus rapid transit project. Work starts April 6, the organization told the Summit County Council at its Wednesday meeting.
Construction, which is contracted through Stacy Witbeck, will run through fall and shift traffic as crews prepare to widen 7.1 miles of road into dedicated lanes for the rapid bus service, which High Valley touts as being able to provide fast and reliable transportation to 5,000 commuters traveling between Kimball Junction and Old Town each day.
The service will run between Olympic Parkway and Kearns Boulevard, about 5 miles. Then, from Kearns to Old Town, there will be mixed-flow transit, with two travel lanes per direction and a turn lane separating them. Service will be provided seven days a week, 6 a.m.-midnight, with a 10-15 minute frequency.
High Valley will hold an open house on April 7 at the Richins Building, 1885 W Ute Blvd., for those looking to learn more or ask questions. On April 3, the transit authority will reveal the name of the service, which it had narrowed down through community and High Valley staff feedback to four finalists as of November: Mountain Town Express, or MTX; The Pulse, or TPX; Double Black, or DBX; and The Bobsled, or BSX.
“It’s such a different service,” High Valley Transit Executive Director Caroline Rodriguez told The Park Record at an open house last spring. “One of the characteristics of bus rapid transit is different branding, different stations, so that people see it as a distinct and different service that is express, frequent, and it’s not like your local bus service.”
Two lanes will remain open during construction, and work will halt during holidays and special events. High Valley estimates the project will take through late 2028, but they will cease work during winter each year from December to March.
The work in this phase will affect five different areas: Olympic Blvd. to Bear Hollow Drive, Silver Springs Road to Canyons Resort Drive, the McPolin Barn to Holiday Ranch Loop Road, the “Box of Rocks” intersection where Park Ave. and Deer Valley Drive meet, and then Meadows Drive to Kearns Blvd., though work there should wrap up this spring.
The work won’t start at every location all at once on April 6, but High Valley will still mark them off, said project manager Gabriel Shields.
“What the traveling public may see is barrels the whole way down, and they may be wondering, ‘Why is High Valley not working over there?’ And a lot of that comes down to … we don’t want to shift traffic around too much and cause confusion,” he said.
High Valley finished the complete design of the project in December and believes it will cost $102 million — about $20 million less than what the group was estimating last summer, though the transit district threw in another $7 million for contingencies, bringing the total budget to $109 million.
Shields said the reduction in cost is mostly due to how High Valley worked with the contractor to carefully plan for the future.
“Working with Stacy Witbeck, it’s critical to them that the project moves forward with honest information,” he said. “So along the way, they have been very transparent about, ‘Look, we’re two years out for construction. We’re going to pad some of these things because we don’t know the information.’ But as we’ve gone down the path, we’ve eliminated some risk.”
A project like this also inevitably overlaps with other construction projects in the area, Shields said. For instance, in 2027, the Utah Department of Transportation is planning a pavement preservation project.
“We’ve been talking about that for a long time, ‘Hey, we’re doing this (bus rapid transit). … Does it make sense for us to do some of this work and then you come in and tear it out? Or do you want us to do your work for you and then you reimburse us?’” Shields said. “And what we landed on was they are going to do the work for us after we finish. Things like that, they really add up. That saved the project probably a million dollars.”
UDOT has a website where Utah residents can sign up to receive updates for any of the ongoing projects in the region, including bus rapid transit, at research.net/r/KR5WGPD.
The widening also means that High Valley needs to secure the right of way in some places in order to construct or operate, either as construction easements or perpetual easements for the service’s longevity. Shields said that the process has also gone smoothly so far.
“We’ve got 36 parcels that we need some sort of interaction with,” Shields said. “Twenty-six of those are acquisitions, whether it’s a temporary construction easement or a simple fee acquisition. Ten of those are donations, so they’re county parcels, city parcels or state (Division of Wildlife Resources) parcels.”
Of those 26 necessary acquisitions, High Valley completed appraisals for 25 and had 11 offers signed.
If all goes according to plan, the service should start in 2028.
“We believe in this project. It’s going to really change the way people move through the community,” Shields said. “This has really been an idea on paper and through a process more than 15 years, and it’s now real. It’s happening, and in short order, we’re going to be riding this thing.”