The National Highway System, quietly born in Congress last November, will soon start bringing improvements to 2,195 miles of Utah's most important highways.
In some cases, the money will be used to reconstruct or rehabilitate key roads, including interstate highways, said Harlan Miller, planning engineer for the Utah division of the Federal Highway Administration."It can also be used for new road alignments and widening," he said, "and there are also some roads on the National Highway System that have not been built yet."
Miller said all interstate highways are on the national system automatically, as are several other non-interstate roads that play a key role in meeting America's transportation and defense needs.
Rod Terry, Region 1 preconstruction engineer for the Utah Department of Transportation, said northern Utah roads on the national system mostly consist of interstates and U.S. 89-91 from Brigham City to Wyoming.
"These are highways that proportionately carry more vehicles per mile than other roads," Miller said. "They tend to be roads that cross state boundaries."
In fact, the 161,000 miles of highway on the system nationwide account for about 40 percent of all vehicle travel in the United States.
Miller said $27 million has been earmarked for improvements on National Highway System roads in Utah during the current fiscal year.
A large chunk of that money is expected to be used for projects to rehabilitate sections of Utah's aging freeway system.
About the same amount will be funded in fiscal 1997, the planning engineer said, but future amounts won't be determined until Congress hammers out a new five-year transportation program that will go into effect in fiscal 1998.
Utah will receive a total of $117.2 million in federal highway dollars this year.
Of that amount, $27 million is set aside for National Highway System roads, while the other $90 million can be used on other roads that qualify for federal assistance.