The main thoroughfare of 2100 South in Sugar House is getting an ambitious facelift. Construction crews have been hard at work on the section of the street between 1300 East and 700 East since March 4.
According to the 2100 South Reconstruction Project website, the construction will “replace aging and failing roadway pavement” while reimagining what the main drag can be. The reconstruction team came up with dozens of potential designs and settled on one that would attempt to keep the same flow of traffic while being more accommodating to bikers and pedestrians.
A community-wide effort
Public involvement lead for the project, Stacee Adams, said the city’s engineers teamed up with other city agencies to narrow their design concepts from 50 ideas to one.
“In addition to the technical staff who do the design, we also work with public utilities, economic development, planning, the mayor’s office, the community councils, local businesses and the public to make sure we’re getting input across the spectrum to help design a road that’s going to work for everybody,” Adams said.
The graphic schematic—which shows what the street will look like when construction is completed near the end of 2025—includes new medians, new left-turn lanes, improved crosswalks, a multi-use path along the side of the road that will replace on-street parking, and more trees along the roadside.
When completed, the street will also consist of an “hourglass” shape, with four lanes leading in and out of the heart of Sugar House and two lanes in the middle.
Adams said her team looked at traffic, parking and pedestrian data to make important design decisions. They found that one million people use the area’s sidewalks each year.
“This means we need to make Sugar House safer for pedestrians and cyclists while maintaining access for cars,” says the project’s final concept video, hosted on the project website. “And we want to do it using space that’s already there, because we want to preserve everything that makes Sugar House, Sugar House.”
Keeping ‘Sugarhouse cozy’
Delfia Valenzuela, civic engagement specialist with Salt Lake City’s engineering division, said the city put out a masterplan in 2001 for the Sugar House area, which called for “keeping the vibe of the neighborhood while enhancing its commercial aspects.”
“It was about growing with the city, but keeping the cozy [of Sugar House],” Valenzuela said.
The “cozy” of Sugar House includes its many local businesses, a walkable town square, and amenities like restaurants and a branch of the city library. Peter McDonald, a board member for the non-profit Sweet Streets SLC, which champions road safety and people-first street design, said Sugar House is particularly attractive to pedestrians for many reasons.
“What Sugar House has that makes it walkable and pedestrian-friendly is that there’s a lot of amenities in a small area,” McDonald said. “If you’re designing a city to be more friendly to pedestrians, you’re going to need more frequent grocery stores. … You’re not going to be driving to the big box stores at the edge of town. [You] need to be able to walk or bike within ten or fifteen minutes to get where you’re going.”
However, McDonald also noted that the proximity of 2100 South to the interstate means it is a major road. And it cuts right through the commercial center of Sugar House. That aspect, McDonald said, is what makes the strip sometimes less appealing to walkers and bikers.
People-first street design
Alan Dalul, a Salt Lake Community College student who often walks along 2100 South in Sugar House, said the heavy construction on the strip has made him nervous lately.
“It’s been chaotic, messy and bizarre,” Dalul said of the construction work that currently exists on the street between 1300 East and 700 East. “The crosswalk lights are just decorations for some people,” he added.
But Dalul likes the area, he said, and he thinks it has always been a nice and safe place to be since arriving from Venezuela three years ago. Dalul said he is hopeful that the myriad of changes in the street’s new design, such as the multi-use path along the roadside, will help alleviate the burdens of walking through the area.
Sugar House resident McDonald, on the other hand, had harsher words for 2100 South.
“If I’m walking through Sugar House, I’m avoiding 2100 South, which is unfortunate because that’s where a lot of the businesses are,” McDonald said. “So, instead of strolling by a business and saying, ‘Oh, I’m going to pop in here,’ I’m cutting through the side streets as quickly as possible, in order to avoid interacting with [2100 S] because, at least prior to the construction, it was pretty unpleasant to be on.”
McDonald’s concern, and that of the non-profit Sweet Streets SLC, is primarily with designing streets “to serve the people who are there on the street.”
“The number one thing that car culture leads to is people picking where they’re going to go, going there and not really interacting with the space they’re in,” McDonald said. “A people-first street is somewhere that people want to go, be and move through while actually enjoying their time there.”
The 2100 South reconstruction team understood the people-first idea. According to Adams, the group held an open house while they were nearly halfway through the development of a new schematic for the street and again when they were done with it, so that the public could see how their input contributed.
“We also did pedestrian-intercept surveys where we went out on the corridor and talked to people,” Adams added. “And [we] did online surveys where we got 15,000 comments on the project.”
Community input led to the final design’s implementation of the multi-use path that will line the side of 2100 South at the time of the project’s completion and accommodate both walkers and bikers. Those planning the design also considered such elements of the street as how many left-turn crashes occur each year, which influenced their conceptual addition of left-turn lanes to assist in the safe flow of traffic.
Some claim that the city is trying to accommodate everyone, motorists, bikers and walkers included, to an unrealistic degree. But McDonald believes the project will be a step in the right direction.
“We think Salt Lake City is doing great things,” McDonald said of the opinion of himself and the other board members at Sweet Streets. “It’s really exciting to be in a city where we’re thinking so seriously about livability and walkability [and] making a city for the people who live there.”
To learn more about the 2100 South Reconstruction Project and to sign up for construction and project updates, visit their website.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the surname of student Alan Dalul. We apologize for the error.
