Resident Robert Ferrara says the neighborhood is full of near-miss incidents.
For two years now he’s been advocating for traffic calming measures like signs, stripes, obstacles that slow drivers.
“None of us can figure out, like, what is really going on? What's the real opposition?” Ferrara said.
As county engineer Brandon Brady explains it, there’s no opposition, there’s just a process. The county instituted a now 13-page traffic calming policy in 2004 after a neighborhood disagreed about speeding solutions.
“So they spent a lot of money putting it in and spent more money tearing it out,” he said. “So they’re like, ‘OK, instead of wasting county dollars on this, we should have a process.’”
That includes forming a neighborhood traffic calming committee to advise the county.
For Ferarra, the chair of that committee in Trailside, it’s been too slow. The county transportation and engineering departments have done multiple traffic studies in the past couple years.
One study established a baseline and began the process to identify the right traffic-calming measures to install. Brady says the county’s policy is to start with the least invasive changes and study physical changes to the road if needed.
“The problem with traffic calming stuff is it all just reminds us that we're speeding, and kind of helps us kind of control that,” Brady said. “But almost all traffic calming things, if you really want to speed, you can speed through them.”
In September 2024, Ferrara says a car hit and injured a child headed to Trailside Elementary School on the first day of school.
“I’ll pay for the stop sign. I mean, I'd even pay for a crosswalk. Just give me the encroachment permit to do it, give me the permission to do it, and I'll go do it, and my neighbors will chip in,” he said.
But government policies list criteria that must be met before each traffic-calming measure can be installed.
Stop signs were thrown out because Trailside Drive curves too much for motorists to see them in time to stop. Additionally, the intersections around Ferrara’s house don’t have the minimum five crashes per year required for the signs.
In denying a stop sign, county engineers also pointed to state guidelines against using stop signs for speed control.
There are already signs reinforcing the 25 mph speed limit. One includes radar to display drivers’ speeds.
Brady says the county tried rumble strips too. The county’s most recent traffic study last April found they reduced average speeds from 32 mph to 31 mph, which isn’t enough return on investment.
The county has settled on a sidewalk for Ferarra’s side of the street to help kids walk to the crosswalks closer to Trailside Elementary.
“We tell [our kids], they have to look, they have to be really careful, they have to line up and get as close to the street as possible without being in the line of the mirrors potentially hitting them,” Ferrara said. “And then after they look left and right and left, they have to sprint across the street as fast as they can.”
Brady says the county doesn’t have money for a sidewalk yet. It needs to apply for a federal Safe Routes to School grant with the Utah Department of Transportation this May.
Plan B is carving out space in the 2026 county budget. 2026 is also the earliest the grant money could arrive.
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