Wasatch Choice Great Streets
Wasatch Choice Great Streets is a planning framework that helps partners make transportation decisions that improve safety and economic impact while reflecting community values and meeting mobility needs. The framework focuses on our streets — how they interact with adjacent buildings, neighborhoods, and commercial districts.
Great Streets is developed by local, regional, and state transportation partners to be used collaboratively to focus efforts and guide street planning that affects Wasatch Choice Centers by:
- Identifying which streets to work on improving context sensitivity (the fit of streets with their adjacent context).
- Providing a starting point for design discussions to improve shared predictability.
Why “Great Streets”
- Streets shape how people move, gather, and experience their communities. When street design aligns with surrounding land uses and community goals, the benefits are broad:
- Safer streets for all users
- Stronger local economies
- Easier to reach jobs, services, and opportunities — locally and regionally
- Outcomes that support local placemaking efforts
Great Streets helps partners balance two equally important considerations:
- Community context – the people, places, land uses, and future vision of a Center
- Regional transportation context – the corridors, transit, trails, and networks that move people and goods across the region.
Where Great Streets Applies: Wasatch Choice Centers
The Wasatch Choice Great Streets framework is focused on Wasatch Choice Centers, which are places identified by communities and adopted by WFRC as key hubs of activity and growth. These include:
Centers are often where regional transportation needs and community priorities intersect most directly — making them ideal places to apply a context-sensitive approach to streets. Centers themselves reduce travel demand since people who live and work in Centers drive 25% shorter distances (because they have more choices to get around and they don’t have to travel as far). Enabling the private sector to develop more homes and jobs in centers actually reduces the need to build infrastructure elsewhere.
Using the Framework
Wasatch Choice Great Streets can support a wide range of planning and project needs, including:
- Regional and local transportation plans
- Corridor and center plans
- Station Area Plans
- Street redesign and reconstruction projects
- Development review and coordination.
Partners may use the framework for awareness, guidance, checklists, or to identify strategies and tools that fit the local context.
Partnerships in Action
Context-sensitive streets are only possible through collaboration. Early coordination, shared visioning, clear roles, and ongoing communication are essential to success. Great Streets was developed in partnership with and encourages continued collaboration between local government, WFRC, MAG, UDOT, and UTA.
