Salt Lake City's Comprehensive Street Design

Course Details

The Salt Lake City Street and Intersection Typologies Design Guide is a vision for reimagining every one of the city's public streets (including state routes). This reimagining elevates people, greening, and placemaking functions.

The city has long known that its streets are too wide, fast, and unsafe. City leaders and project managers needed a strategy for redesigning public rights-of-way to improve safety, choices, and inclusivity. The guide features 17 new street types (or typologies), intersection typology recommendations, an interactive map, and policy and procedural recommendations focused on implementation. The concept of design speed was critical to these approaches.

This case study walks through the process of developing — and now implementing — the guide, relating land-use and transportation functions to street design and identifying the types of public-space activities appropriate for surrounding land uses. The guide's city and consultant project team provide insights on how they made critical decisions and addressed challenges through collaboration with a broad range of stakeholders.

Learning Outcomes

• Identify critical functions of the public right-of-way and prioritize space for them, depending on the land-use and transportation contexts.
• Anticipate engineering, funding, and policy challenges inherent in comprehensive redesign and reconstruction of public rights-of-way.
• Assess critical dimensions needed for various purposes of the right-of-way, considering all modes of transportation as well as landscaping and placemaking features.