City staff, consultants present preferred Wall Avenue design to calm traffic and improve pedestrian access

Jacob Farnsworth, a project consultant with Kimley Horn, told the South Ogden City Council at its Oct. 7 work session that the preferred concept for the Wall Avenue corridor focuses on traffic calming and active transportation between 22nd and 27th streets. He said the plan would add medians, bulb-outs and a multi-use path, and would include signalized mid‑block crossings where pedestrian demand is high.

“The vision for Wall Avenue was to better connect Union Station with 25th Street to serve as a multimodal corridor,” Farnsworth said, describing the preferred concept and three rejected alternatives: a pedestrian overpass, a bypass tunnel with express lanes and a full boulevard median. He said the overpass option would require 255-foot ADA ramps that would block vehicle and retail access; an express-tunnel would create major utility relocations and eliminate many left turns; and a boulevard median would remove on-street parking and increase travel times.

Council members raised trade-offs between slowing traffic to create a more walkable downtown and preserving travel times for through drivers. One councilor noted community pushback from drivers who use Wall Avenue to reach Riverdale for shopping. Farnsworth said preliminary analysis shows travel times for north–south trips could increase by “a couple minutes” through the remodeled section but that the design preserves vehicle capacity while reducing vehicle speeds.

Staff stressed that the near-term package is meant to be implementable within roughly 0–10 years, with more transformational options (express lanes/underpasses, 24th Street viaduct changes) considered as 20–30 year scenarios. City staff said they are coordinating closely with the Utah Department of Transportation, which helped fund corridor planning and whose agreement will be critical before the city finalizes the plan.

UDOT constraints and railroad operations were cited repeatedly as implementation risk factors. Farnsworth said utility relocations, dewatering and right‑of‑way limits make some long-term options infeasible on a 10-year timeline.

Councilors asked technical questions about mid‑block crossings, whether they would be demand-only or signalized, and the lane-width strategy. Farnsworth said the mid‑block crossings in the preferred concept would be signalized and that narrower (11‑foot) lanes are being proposed to induce lower speeds, though that would require UDOT deviations from standard lane widths.

The council asked staff to continue coordination with UDOT and other agencies and to return when corridor-agreement language and responses from UDOT are available. The work session discussion concluded with staff saying they are awaiting a second set of comments from UDOT and that a corridor agreement is the next formal step.