Herald Journal
In an effort to increase pedestrian safety, the speed limit in Logan Canyon near the Stokes Nature Center has been temporarily reduced.
“It’s really scary to walk along that shoulder, crossing with your 3-year-old hoping that they don’t decide they want to run into the road because they saw a cool rock,” said Megan Dettenmaier, the valley resident who led the petition for a lower speed limit.
Dettenmaier is the parent of a child who attends the Stokes Nature Center preschool, located in Logan Canyon to the south of U.S. Highway 89 across from the Cache National Forest sign.
In order to access the center, or the River Trail located next to it, individuals like Dettenmaier have the option of parking in the pullout area on the north side of the road and crossing the highway, or parking on the south shoulder and walking along the highway.
“In a perfect world we would have a school zone there during those hours,” Dettenmaier said. “But because Stokes is not a traditional school in the sense that they receive tax dollars like Wilson Elementary would, we can’t qualify for having a very severely reduced speed zone.”
Because Highway 89 is a state road, Dettenmaier’s petition was taken to the Utah Department of Transportation. After considering the issue, department officials decided to place pedestrian signs on the road near the center and reduce the speed limit from 50 to 40 miles per hour for six months.
Utah Department of Transportation representative Vic Saunders said after six months of reduced speeds, the department will conduct a traffic study. A new speed limit will be set for that area of the road based on the speed 85 percent of drivers are traveling, plus or minus 5 miles an hour.
“That 85th percentile speed is the one that most people feel as they drive a roadway, that they can make all the maneuvers required to safely travel that road,” Saunders said.
According to Saunders, it's important to use this method to ensure speeds aren't set too low.
“If the speed limit is set artificially low, people will exceed it irrespective of what it is posted,” Saunders said.
Dettenmaier said she is mildly happy about the reduction, but doesn’t see it as the solution to overall pedestrian safety.
“It is a step in the right direction and we have a long way to go to get pedestrians off of the highway,” Dettenmaier said. “And the way we do that is we provide alternative means to get to that trail that are as efficient and that are readily accessible and that are easy to get to.”
A few such pedestrian options might include a highway underpass or overpass option.
Although there are two underpass options in the canyon right now, interim executive director of the Center Emily Blake said neither option is a good solution for children using the center.
The first underpass is at First Dam, which requires users to hike for about a mile before reaching the center.
The second one is located at the Cache National Forest sign, which is much closer to the center, however pedestrians parking on the north side cannot access the underpass because there is no way to cross the river.
Blake said if there was a bridge, there likely wouldn’t need to be a reduced speed in that part of the canyon.
“That would be the same distance of a walk for the nature preschoolers, we just don’t have the infrastructure or the funding to build a bridge over the river,” Blake said.
Cache County Trails Planner Dayton Crites said other options for increasing pedestrian safety in the canyon may include making the road feel less like a highway.
“The solutions I would like to see considered is how do we change the structure of that highway in terms of narrowing it, in terms of adding medians in the center, in terms of beautification efforts to add plantings and other things to the side that make it feel a little less like a high-speed highway and more of a scenic drive,” Crites said.
In the meantime, both Crites and Dettenmaier hope people will heed the new the speed limit signs so the temporary reduction can become permanent.
“If people don’t pay attention to the speed limit, if people ignore them flat out, they may end up putting it back just as high or higher,” Crites said. “So we certainly hope that’s not the case.”
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