A new freeway is slowly appearing on Salt Lake County, Utah’s west side. The Mountain View Corridor, SR-85, will parallel Interstate 15 from roughly Salt Lake International Airport south to Saratoga Springs, and possibly one day, west of Utah Lake to Payson.
It’s one of the few large-scale, non-tolled urban freeway projects going on in the country, that I’m aware of.
Demolishing Neighborhoods
The process seems much cleaner today. The engineers over at UDOT have been working on the EIS for this freeway for about a decade (at least). The planners over at WFRC have been talking about this highway for probably three times that long.
As I’ve watched the process, it seems like great care has gone into minimizing the impact (and cost) of this project. If I were king for a day, I’d have just shoved the freeway straight down 6400 West, rather than curving it east toward its alignment at 5800 West.