By Hope Zitting | [email protected]

South Valley - Safety should be among one of the top priorities when it comes to schools. Many schools have done all that they can to ensure safety within their buildings; yet, what about the lack of safety that may occur outside of the school buildings?

“I have concerns about traffic patterns over by the high school when taking a child to school. There’s people cutting-off and whipping U-turns. [I’m] Just wondering if the Council has heard that or maybe have some plans to do something about that situation. And the other thing I worry about is enforcement at red lights. I still see a lot of people running red lights and I’m worried maybe my kid or… me at the intersection when that happens. So, just concerns about that,” William Jackson, a resident of Herriman City, said during a previous City Council Meeting on Feb. 24. 

As a result of this concern that was publicly voiced to Herriman Mayor Carmen Freeman and the Herriman City Council, a traffic analysis was performed on the surrounding roads of Herriman High School and within the school’s boundaries. 

Blake Thomas, the City Engineer of Herriman, presented the Herriman High Traffic Study Analysis to the City Council and Mayor during the City Council Meeting on March 23 at the Herriman City Council Building located at 13011 South Pioneer Street in Herriman during the Reports, Presentations and Appointments portion of the meeting.

Many tests concerning the traffic patterns of Herriman High School, located at 11800 South Mustang Trail Way were conducted on Feb. 16 with the help of Avenue Consultants.

Avenue Consultants is an engineering company that, “…solve the most challenging transportation problems with new ideas that you can actually build. We identify the right solutions by leveraging common sense and creative thinking. We make difficult technical concepts easy to understand and support,” as described on the Taylorsville-based company’s website.

The traffic analysis concluded that there were two peaks in traffic during the day at certain time periods, also known as the weekday school hour turning movement volumes. The morning rush, beginning at 6:45 a.m. and lasting for an hour resulted in hundreds of cars entering the high school and only a portion of vehicles exiting. The afternoon congestion, which starts at 2:15 p.m. and lasts for an hour, as well, reported a comparably small amount of cars entering, and hundreds of vehicles exiting the high school parking lot.

The amount of entering vehicles into the school parking lot at 7:15 a.m. reached over 200, with about 90 of those vehicles peak exiting at 7:25 a.m. After school ended at 2:25 p.m., a huge amount of traffic- over 160 vehicles- left the parking lot at the same time around 2:30 p.m.

The Herriman High School traffic analysis studied six different intersections around the high school and surrounding neighborhoods. The South Access, Drop-Off Exit and West Parking Access are the most congested entrances and exits along Mustang Trail Way into the school.

The North Parking Access located on 11800 South is also a largely congested entrance and exit into Herriman High School. 

Herriman High School houses over 2,500 students, being one of the largest public high schools in the entire state of Utah.

To remediate the problem of traffic congestion within and near Herriman High School, Avenue Consultants suggested building cement barriers in strategic places along the surrounding roads to curb illegal and dangerous driving, similar to what South Jordan had done concerning Bingham High School.

Mayor Freeman and the City Council voiced a few concerns concerning the potential solutions and advised the presenters to meet with the Jordan School District. Blake Thomas and the representative from Avenue Consultants agreed and should update the Mayor and City Council on their findings within the following month.