Grand Boulevard
North Temple Community Plan
The Salt Lake City Department of Community & Economic Development is sponsoring a public discussion of plans for the redevelopment of the North Temple corridor. It will be June 18th from 5:30 to 7:30 PM in the Grand Building at the Utah State Fairpark. There will be free pizza and drinks.
I presume this will mostly be about the Fairpark side of North Temple and reworking the North Temple overpass area to accommodate a transit station the UTA plans to build there, as well as make the area more pedestrian friendly and a better gateway into downtown.
The UTA North Temple station was brought up at the Utah APA chapter luncheon held at the UTA offices today. They also mentioned they will be contributing money to the redevelopment project, and one UTA rep specifically mentioned that the transit station might be a good economic development opportunity for the area.
All of this plays very well with my ideas for the area, specifically the North Temple overpass. Right now, it’s a wasteland and because of the train tracks, I was worried there might be some reluctance to modifying the area enough to make it more bike and pedestrian friendly but UTA’s involvement makes me a little more hopeful. Ultimately, what I’m hoping for is a more accessible and inviting corridor between downtown and the west side, and it sounds like that’s what everyone already involved wants as well.
I might write something up for the luncheon soon but I did want to mention one interesting thing I want to look into as soon as possible: Transit Oriented Development. The first presenter brought this up by mentioning that every Park & Ride is for sale for this TOD program. It would be nice to know the terms and what, if anything, has been done so far. And maybe this will motivate me to find out if the city is still planning on closing the 1000 North freeway access since the Park & Ride on that east corner would be a nice candidate for some kind of transit related development if the onramps and off ramp were no longer there.