Nightmare Scenario Just a Bad Pass Away on Us 6

By Sun Advocate

A reader called me the other day and told me about something he saw that morning as he drove from Green River to Price.
He was traveling at the speed limit and he saw a car come up behind him very quickly passing many other vehicles no matter what was in the oncoming southbound lanes. As he looked north he could see a yellow vehicle approaching. It was a school bus.
The passing vehicle was soon upon the his car and began to pass. The school bus was only a short ways away, and the passer barely made it without hitting the bus head on. The reader said that as the bus passed he saw it was full of kids.
He called the incident his “greatest nightmare” on US 6. It is something he said he had thought about for years and now he had actually seen it almost happen. He pointed out that a four lane road is needed very badly between Green River and Spanish Fork.
In speaking with Utah Department of Transportation officials over the last four years that I have worked with the paper, I have yet to find one official that disagrees with that analysis. They all believe the highway would be much safer if there could be four lanes all the way. But as has been discussed many times before, money is the problem, and they can only do what the legislature allows them to do. UDOT plans it’s own projects, and they have targeted four lanes on US 6 as one of their main goals over the next 10 years. They even assigned a full time manager just for projects on that road two years ago. They are serious, but the legislature continues to find many other ways to appropriate funds.
Certainly there are many ways to spend the money the state collects and then some. But the problem could be solved simply by allowing toll road districts to be formed in the state, just for such projects. A lot of people wouldn’t like that, but it certainly wouldn’t bother me if I had to pay a couple of bucks each time I passed through the mountains especially if it was on a much safer corridor.
Admittedly that wouldn’t take the nightmare completely away, because accidents would still happen, but it would take the “sit-up-in-bed” in the middle of the night edge off it.