Utah’s vaunted 'walkable city' still has tens of thousands of parking spots

2022-04-04T19:04:00-04:00

“It’s not that no one has a car,” said Peter Kindel, an urban design and planning principal at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill who helped create the framework plan for the site that project overseers approved last year. “We’re suggesting it’s more than possible to live with one car to make that big-box [store] trip or go skiing. But for families and young people that are going to be part of the community, they won’t need that on a day-to-day basis.”

The 600-acre The Point development in Draper, Utah, will replace an aging prison complex and will include some 40,000 parking spaces — a typical figure for a community of its planned size of about 13,000 residents.

Previously on Archinect: A '15-minute' planned community is set to rise in Utah

A forthcoming mobility study to be presented to the Point of the Mountain State Land Authority by the transportation consultancy Sam Schwartz is aiming to reduce that number by half via a high-tech admixture of electric scooters, planned bikeways, car-sharing, and (potentially) a fleet of self-driving buses.

“We want to push the envelope,” Point of the Mountain State Land Authority Executive Director Alan Matheson told Bloomberg, “but we also need to be practical.”

A '15-minute' planned community is set to rise in Utah

2022-01-20T09:00:00-05:00

A new planned community in Utah will strive to make it possible for residents to meet all their daily needs within 15 minutes without getting in a car — and to serve as a model for other U.S. developers who want to build basic mobility into the foundations of their designs.

Called The Point, the envisoned community will be located in Draper, Utah, and take up about one square mile of state-owned land. The development, master-planned by SOM, will specifically aim to reduce the need for cars by featuring extensive biking, walking, and transit systems.

A range of transportation strategies will be employed in order to achieve this plan. Vehicle traffic will be restricted from a .125-square-mile section of the downtown core called the “pedestrian priority zone.” In addition, mixed-use zoning will make homes easily accessible to jobs, schools, and essential services. There will also be a city circulator that will shuttle residents around the community and connect to other transit routes.

The Point of the Mountain State Land Authority, the government agency overseeing the project, is currently in the process of selecting a developer for the project. Construction of the community will likely start in late 2024.

Archinect - News

Utah’s vaunted 'walkable city' still has tens of thousands of parking spots

A '15-minute' planned community is set to rise in Utah