Herriman's answer at Lower Meadow is a widening that begins in 2035

Herriman has a stronger claim to be taken seriously on traffic than most cities its size. The Transportation Master Plan the City Council adopted in March 2026 rests on five full years of UDOT crash data, reporting that 1.8 percent of the city's crashes involved a death or suspected serious injury against 2.2 percent countywide 1. It is running a real calming experiment on Emmeline Drive, with monitoring before anything is permanent 3. Asked this month whether flashing beacons were possible at Lower Meadow, communications manager Jonathan LaFollette called it "theoretically" possible and added that the city has "a lot of intersections... and we only have so much money to be able to address things" 4. That is an honest answer from a city with real constraints.

The corner is Sentinel Ridge Boulevard at Lower Meadow Drive, where the Department of Public Safety count FOX 13 reported is 15 crashes since 2021, two involving pedestrians 4. Herriman's plan names it twice: in the regional safety plan, for "traffic calming and medians along Sentinel Ridge Boulevard including a high visibility crosswalk or pedestrian refuge island at the intersection with Lower Meadow Drive," and as WFRC project 10.54.3, with "bulbouts at all school crossings" 1. Its own diagnosis, at the adjacent Rosecrest Road intersection, is that "turning drivers are failing to see pedestrians in the crosswalk" 1.

Residents asked for a light. The plan's comment table answers: "There are plans to widen Sentinel Ridge Boulevard south of this intersection (see project 2-10). Signals must meet MUTCD warrants to be installed" 1. In that table the Sentinel Ridge widening from Rosecrest Road to Real Vista Way is project 2-9 at $7,349,439; project 2-10 is a Real Vista Drive widening toward Bluffdale at $6,066,428. The cross-reference lands on another road. Both are 2035-to-2050 projects 1.

Warrants are not the wall that implies. The manual lists eight, including Warrant 7, Crash Experience, and states that "the satisfaction of a traffic signal warrant or warrants shall not in itself require the installation of a traffic control signal" 5. The city's own model expects Sentinel Ridge Boulevard from Rosecrest Road to Bruin View Drive to fail by 2035 1.

The state highway is where the edges show. On Nov. 11 a crash closed all northbound lanes of Mountain View Corridor at 11800 South, and UDOT listed it as major 6. The plan's safety chapter states that "crashes that occurred on Mountain View Corridor are excluded from all parts of the analysis" 1. The city counts 2,107 crashes and 38 severe ones on the roads it owns, and none on the state highway. That is a division of responsibility rather than a concealment — the corridor is a state road — but the two documents a resident can hold the city to do not describe the same network 16.

The money is where that constraint stops explaining the outcome. The plan's appendix prices the Sentinel Ridge corridor package at $4,287,000, with a 20 percent local match of $857,400 that it calls the city's share "toward SS4A Implementation Grants"; within it, flashing beacons cost $15,000, a refuge island $30,000, crosswalks $36,000 apiece 1. Nothing in the adopted fiscal 2027 and 2028 budget appropriates that match, and nothing this paper could find says whether Herriman applied, or for what. Transportation capital in the general fund is a $338,000 reimbursement on 11800 South and $700,000 for Rosecrest Road rehabilitation in fiscal 2027, then Soleil Hills work in 2028 2. The three signals — $275,000 at Dansie Oaks Boulevard, $275,500 at Miller Crossing Drive, $750,000 at Auto Row — sit in the impact fee fund 2, collected for "costs of future roadways to new development (growth)," so not the pot for a retrofit at an existing crossing; that fund's own note says most future revenue goes to debt service on the 2025 bonds 2. The general capital list is where a retrofit would go: three names, none of them a crosswalk.

Five days ago this paper argued that Herriman counted the crashes and then budgeted for capacity. Nothing adopted since has changed that. The decision belongs to the Herriman City Council, and it is two decisions together: the March 2026 plan, which schedules the corner's remedy for a phase beginning in 2035, and the fiscal 2027 and 2028 budget, which funds capacity and rehabilitation and leaves the safety list to a grant it has not described publicly. At a crossing with 15 crashes in five years, the remedy is a widening two decades out, the countermeasure costs $45,000, and families are directed to signals further up the road 4.

We would change our mind on four things: Emmeline Drive's before-and-after speeds, with the 85th-percentile figure and a date on whether the devices stay; a $45,000 line, or the $857,400 match, in a capital budget; a public statement of where the SS4A application stands; or a council vote that treats WFRC project 10.54.3 as a project rather than a citation.

Herriman's plan is one of the more honest documents of its kind in this valley. Honesty is not the gap. The gap is that the city has priced the fix, named the corner, and put the money somewhere else.