Backdrop of Metro St. George. North or South, The Wasatch Front and emerging St. George Metro are unsurpassed when it comes to their immediate scenery.
by ap0013
by goobersmyn
St. George beltway will stretch the city -
Southern Parkway » First five miles of airport access now paved.
By Brandon Lomis
The Salt Lake Tribune
St. George » If you thought Utah's sunbelt already was loose, take a drive down I-15 toward the Arizona line and gaze east at the city's bulging waistline.
The Southern Parkway's first pavement is already there at Exit 2, and the earth movers are flattening hundreds of acres of state land for the coming waves of stucco and tile. This is where the nation's second-fastest-growing metro area spills next.
"It's a tremendous leap for our city," Mayor Daniel McArthur said. The four lanes will enable a doubling of the city's population without forcing everyone to cross a single bridge and pass an industrial park into downtown. In early 2011 it will deliver passengers to a new airport
that portends a boom in direct flights to the winter vacation spot.
"Transportation is what helps with quality of life," the mayor said.
At Exit 2, across the freeway from the new Sun River retirement community, the pace is quickening. Heavy equipment compacts a flat, dusty expanse of School and Institutional Trust Lands that will be sold off to benefit schools. This is a tract called the Southern Block, and SITLA plans 13,000 homes, 10 schools, a state welcome center and extensive parks over 6,200 acres along the beltway.
Snaking across the Mojave Desert hillocks and within cowpie-kicking distance of the Arizona Strip, Utah's freshest blacktop rolls in Old West loneliness to the airport site. Right now its divided lanes are paved 5 miles to a dirt trail called River Road, and that link will open to traffic in June.
Before long the parkway will be a throbbing artery serving thousands of residents -- eventually tens of thousands. It rolls 40 miles, past Sand Hollow Reservoir and up to State Route 9 at Hurricane. It's a big slice of taupe and red arroyos thick with quail, hidden by mesas from the rest of St. George.
Northeast in Hurricane, near the spot where the parkway will end, California refugee Mike Hayward leaned on a flatbed truck munching a free hot dog Thursday afternoon, the new Wal-Mart's opening day. Five hundred cars festered in the mid-80s spring heat, and the retiree from San Diego saw the future crawling past on SR-9.
It's a future when he no longer routinely drives 65 mph. It's a bit like San Diego.
"I don't see the traffic as ever being a problem ... now," Hayward said. "But they plan on building all this up. If it continues growing the way they say, we'll need another way."
Few of the newcomers complain about the traffic. Like Hayward, Connie Bishop said it's smooth going, so far. Mostly she and her husband drive into the desert to mountain bike near their winter home. They also keep a home in Silverton, Colo.
"When I drive, I don't see any problem," the two-month Sun River resident said.
The number crunchers predict serious traffic jams, though, and soon unless the roads keep up.
In St. George, McArthur said, 10,000 acres of state and private land await the parkway, potentially pushing the city toward 200,000 people. And that's just St. George. Washington City and Hurricane have their own swaths. Hurricane plans 40,000 homes along the south side of SR-9, across from the Wal-Mart, City Engineer Arthur LeBaron said. That's eight times as many homes as the city currently boasts, depending on a planned water pipeline from Lake Powell. SR-9's five lanes won't get all those people into the St. George metro core efficiently.
"If this gets to the point where it is too congested, then people would definitely choose the [belt] route," LeBaron said.
So far the state Transportation Commission has budgeted less than $200 million for the $475 million project. Road planners are negotiating for partnerships with local governments and real estate developers to help cover the rest.
The U.S. Census count for Washington County has nearly doubled to about 140,000 people this decade (150,000 by local estimates), though the national economic downturn last year slowed the annual growth rate to 3 percent. The Dixie Metropolitan Planning Organization estimates that with economic recovery the population will double again before 2035, and state planners estimate an even faster doubling.
Though I-15 and SR-9 will broaden to meet demand, the Southern Parkway is the only major new thoroughfare on the horizon.
A few years ago, when UDOT planners said they expected to open the new interchange at Exit 2 this spring, people wondered why. It was just more desert on the road to Las Vegas.
Then came Sun River, a self-contained retirement town where the residents all wear name tags and the tee times are easy.
"People said, 'What are you building an interchange all the way down there for?' " regional UDOT spokesman Kevin Kitchen said. "By the time we got that ready to open, development had already overtaken it.
"It's really about beating the growth curve down here."
The parkway is planned in five phases to be built as funding comes available. The second phase, stretching four miles east of River Road, is expected to open before the airport does in two years.
Southern Parkway outlook
40 miles.
5 miles open by June.
$475 million total cost.
70,000 daily car trips between I-15 and the airport by 2040.
Skirting 50,000 or more homes at buildout.
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now is the time to instate some urban growth boundaries for that metro, or it will be a massive sprawling cluster of humanity that has engulfed all the natural beauty around it. That's the problem with beautiful places, lot's of people want to live there thus making it less beautiful...
) space, the answer is no one. It is just open land. Possibly the forest service may oversee it, but there really isn't anything to keep up because that's the point - it's open, natural land. 
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