Not enough concrete, it's simple as that.
Or is it? wondered a good number of speakers who took the dais this week at a Capitol hearing on the state's burgeoning transportation headaches."Very fundamental lifestyle changes" is what Utah Department of Transportation director Tom Warne advocated as he warmed up the crowd for a menu of notions that ranged during the evening from a call for more tele-com-muting and a four-day work week to ringing endorsements of light rail.
The Wednesday event laid some of the foundation for Gov. Mike Leavitt's growth summit in December, set to revolve around three hot topics - water, transportation and open space.
Clearly the issue of paramount concern, however, is how people are finding more and more trouble traveling urban Utah, not to mention the fallout associated with gridlock.
"We're living in a sea of air pollution," said Dianne Nielson, the state's top environmental officer, who said life beside a mountain range is a mixed blessing.
You've got scenery, said Nielson, but you've also got a topography-and-climate combination that traps dirty air.
"We're not going to move the mountains, and we're not going to change the weather," said Nielson, who added that half the Wasatch Front's air pollution is from cars and trucks and that the only way to change that number is for people to stop driving around so much.
"We must assume individual responsibility," said Nielson.
Agreed, said a handful of influential lawmakers, though their concern seemed focused most on how to get I-15 rebuilt so that the state's busiest traffic corridor can keep up with demand.
"We want to see some pavement being laid and not quite so much paperwork," said Rep. Stephen M. Bodily, R-Lewiston, co-chairman of the Transportation and Public Safety Appropriations Sub-com-mit-tee.
Bodily said years of consideration and two legislative task forces have made it abundantly plain that Utah roads haven't kept up with the population and that the state transportation fund - supported by gas-tax revenues - has lagged far behind general-fund and school-fund growth.
"It's absolutely out of control," said Rep. Marda Dillree, D-Farmington, lamenting a present in which the future seems bleak and the past is a dim memory of uncluttered country commuting along the Wasatch Front.
"No longer does that beautiful corridor exist that ran from Ogden to Salt Lake City," she said.
Enough "talk about," said Sen. John Holmgren, R-Bear River City, the other co-chairman of the transportation subcommittee: Let's get some roads built.
How to pay for it all?
"In Utah, the cost of motor fuel is at a 30-year low (when inflation is taken into account)," said Michael Christensen, executive director of the Utah Foundation, a nonpartisan research group. "It has never been cheaper to jump in our cars and go somewhere."
Though he stopped short of advocating a specific hike in the state's 19-cent-per-gallon gas tax - which was last raised in 1987 - Christensen said it ought to be enough "to do the job well."
And he said it's only fair for gas-tax revenues to pay for new roads because that limits the burdens to users. It might not even be a bad idea to enact a built-in tax hike at the pump every six months, as other states have done, said Christensen.
The state's entire travel mindset needs to change, said Julie Eldridge, a spokeswoman for Future Moves Coalition, a recently founded nonprofit planning group. If current trends persist, she said, twice as many cars will be on the road in Utah by the year 2015, and the average speed of urban traffic will slow to a 15-mph crawl.
Eldridge criticized housing developments built around cul-de-sac streets and walker-unfriendly neighborhoods that force residents "to use a pint of gas to get a pint of milk."
Wilf Sommerkorn, from Utah's chapter of the American Planning Association, said local cities need more fiscal home rule so they can levy heftier transportation taxes.
Shelly Cordon Teuscher of the Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce endorsed more and continuing tax incentives for clean fuels and corporate structures that encourage carpooling, telecommuting and shorter work weeks.
"We've studied it to death," added Robert Farrington Jr., executive director of the Downtown Alliance.
UTA's spokesman, Bill Barnes, used Farrington's comments as a springboard for his own standard pitch for light rail, saying it would carry 14,000 commuters in and out of the downtown area daily, travel at average speeds of 55 mph and cover the distance between Sandy and downtown in 27 minutes.
He offered, too, a statistic that might've impressed highway builders.
Light rail, said Barnes, would move as many people as two or three lanes lanes of new freeway.