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Doctors, parents, transit advocates and environmentalists on Thursday protested the approval of a long-range transportation plan for the Wasatch Front, arguing it was too heavily weighted in favor of road-building over mass transit and would make the region's air quality worse.
After about an hour of the testimony from critics of the plan, the Wasatch Front Regional Council, as expected, unanimously endorsed a transportation blueprint covering the next 23 years that includes the eight-lane Mountain View Corridor along 5800 West in Salt Lake County.
Representatives of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, Utah Moms for Clean Air, Utahns for Better Transportation, Friends of Great Salt Lake and the Sierra Club said approving the plan without a transit option to accompany Mountain View likely would threaten the health of regional residents, particularly children.
Bouncing her baby, Cherise Udell, founder of Utah Moms for Clean Air, told the regional planning panel that their vision looked like a blueprint for Los Angeles sprawl and pollution.
"I keep thinking America doesn't need another Los Angeles," she said.
The council is made up of elected officials from Salt Lake and Davis counties. The council updates its long-range transportation plan every four years - in this case the 2030 Long-Range Transportation Plan - to map out future road and transit projects and determine when they might be funded and built. Federal law requires that air quality is a key component of any calculations.
Brian Moench, whose physicians' advocacy group is concerned about pollution spikes in northern Utah, told the regional council during its hearing Thursday that the 2030 plan not only failed to adequately address the medical problems caused by bad air, "it virtually guarantees to exacerbate them."
Air quality in Salt Lake County, Provo and Logan routinely ranks as the worst in the nation, Moench said, adding "there is no safe level of air pollution."
Moench also criticized the plan's air quality calculations for not taking into account new coal-fired power plants planned near the Nevada state line upwind of Salt Lake County nor the expansion plans of Wasatch Front oil refineries. Nor, he said, was there any mention in the plan of the fact that air pollution concentrates near its source, putting people who live near freeways at greater risk for health problems.
Thanks to voters who approved extra sales taxes for transit, northern Utah now is building more light- and heavy-rail projects than anywhere in the nation except Denver. But regional council staffer Kip Billings presented findings showing mass transit would do little to curtail nitrous oxides, the main components of particulate pollution during winter inversions and ozone pollution in summer.
At the same time, Billings pointed out that new federal laws guaranteed pollution levels would drop. In particular, he said, regulations on diesel fuel that just went into effect would bring significant pollution decreases as newer trucks rotate into use.
Big-rig truck traffic accounts for 6 percent of all vehicles on the road but 40 percent of all nitrous oxide pollution. Billings estimated that because of the new diesel rule, nitrous oxides would decline 58 percent by 2015.
Billings also said that as more highways are built in Utah, congestion relief will mean fewer idling cars spewing emissions. He added that his calculations included extra miles people would drive if highways and arterials were less congested.
In the past, the Utah Department of Transportation has estimated vehicle miles traveled would grow double to triple the rate that population expands. But regional council executive director Chuck Chappell said that estimate is no longer valid. Rather, he said, the 2030 plan assumed vehicle miles traveled would increase 52 percent when the population grows by 42 percent.
After the vote, Salt Lake County Mayor Peter Corroon noted the plan is always a work in progress, updated every four years. "This isn't a 23-year plan, it's a four-year plan," he said. "This council is moving in the right direction."
Marc Heileson, a Sierra Club spokesman, however, said transportation planning mathematical formulas severely underestimate actual transit ridership. Ridership projections for the FrontRunner commuter rail system that will start up next year show just 5,900 people will board the trains daily, compared to nearly 10 times that number of passengers already on TRAX trains daily.
Using a formula that so underestimates transit ridership hurts the 2030 plan's credibility and guarantees Mountain View will create a monster on the valley's west side, Heileson said.
"The fastest-growing area of the county, an eight-lane freeway and no transit - what do you think is going to happen?" he asked after the meeting.
Heileson also charged that building Mountain View Corridor within the health danger zone of 500 meters from Hunter High and Whittier and Hillside elementary schools meant students there may never develop healthy lung capacity.
"Every student at those schools will be eight times more likely to have leukemia," he said, citing medical studies that Moench and others have used to make their case. "We're basically building a cancer corridor, not the Mountain View Corridor."