Blog Archives - Jay Evensen

State may put an end to SLC's dreams for vacant land

2/28/2018

You might say Salt Lake City had its chance.

Developing the city’s northwest quadrant, an area west of the international airport, has been a long-time dream of city leaders trying to deal with a housing affordability problem.

The city is hemmed in on three sides by mountains and boundaries. Homes in its wealthier neighborhoods keep appreciating, while middle-income families choose to buy in the suburbs and commute. The northwest quadrant, raw desert land, has sat for decades like a veritable Oz on the horizon, shining with promise.

“This,” former Mayor Palmer DePaulis said in 1988, pointing west of the airport, “is where we believe the future of Salt Lake City will be.”

But in the intervening 30 years, the city did nothing to make that future happen. It lacked the resources

U of U study shows dangers of partially autonomous cars

2/28/2018

Francesco Biondi was in the driver’s seat of a partially self-driving car not long ago, talking to his passengers and enjoying the ride while the autopilot did the work. Then the car stopped behind a long line of cars inching their way through a four-way stop at an intersection.

“As long as the car in front would stop and restart, the system worked well, up until the point I was the first car in the line,” he said.

It's time to remove the sales tax from food in Utah

2/28/2018

When watching a deliberative process such as lawmaking, it’s easy to get sucked into feeling overly excited about small steps without considering the mountains that lie ahead.

Even football fans know not to dance in the aisles too much over a first down, and so those who care about the poor in Utah should contain themselves.
They scored a first down last week when the Utah

Are Utahns ready to ditch the death penalty?

2/21/2018

If you don’t think the times are a-changin’, to quote reluctant Nobel prize winner Bob Dylan, consider that Utah’s speaker of the House, Greg Hughes, a self-described “staunch conservative,” wants to end the death penalty in the state.

That is, he wants to end it in the state that famously led the charge to bring it back in the United States in 1977 by executing Gary Gilmore.

Politics may go in cycles, but if this succeeds it would rival any up-and-down Lagoon could offer.

On Tuesday, Hughes announced his support for HB379, a bill sponsored by Rep. Gage Froerer,

Why Utah's .05 DUI law is a good thing

2/21/2018

Let’s have a sober discussion about drunk driving laws.

The main hoped-for benefit of Utah’s pending new .05 blood-alcohol limit for drunk driving is that it would begin to change a stubborn culture in the U.S. that tolerates a level of impaired driving while keeping people guessing as to how impaired they are.

It isn’t to reduce accidents involving people with alcohol levels of between .05 and the current .08 limit, which opponents constantly hammer home to demonstrate how ridiculous the new limit would be.

But let’s look at that soberly, too. Claims that the number of accidents involving people in this range are negligible are misleading. The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration reports that 2,017 people died nationwide in accidents involving drivers with .01 to .07 in 2016.

Why are we letting Russians tell us how to vote?

2/16/2018

If you were a candidate and Russian interference was helping your campaign, would you react with outrage, out of a patriotic duty to national security, or would you deny it was happening?

That question, in a nutshell, explains why a Russian disinformation campaign using social media can be so effective. It feeds into the built-in philosophical biases a lot of Americans already have. It makes any government agency investigating interference

It's time to end police quotas for citations and arrests

2/14/2018

True confession time: About a month ago I was driving a desolate stretch of road in my city when I got pulled over and cited for speeding.

This sort of thing doesn’t happen often to me, but I had no reasonable defense, other than maybe an extra-judicial appeal to the fact that, with no other cars or pedestrians on the road, I wasn’t a threat to public safety. Oh, and the posted speed limit had dropped suddenly from 35 mph to 25 mph at the last stop sign, which didn’t seem to make much

The Utah Legislature's odd sex scandal

2/12/2018

In a week when bizarre stories seemed to cascade like a game of “can you top this,” one of the Utah Legislature’s least flamboyant members, Sen. Evan Vickers of Cedar City, sat down with reporters on Friday to explain how a strange brown-haired woman who looked to be in her 30s and otherwise was “fairly normal looking” had knocked on his hotel room door, insisting she was his date.

“I’m your date,” Vickers said she told him. “We have reservations downtown.”

A Maine official tells Utah to beware of expanded Medicaid

2/7/2018

Mary Mayhew wants Utahns to hear the other side of the Medicaid Expansion debate.

Chances are you’ve heard one side — the one about how expanding Medicaid in Utah would extend health coverage to people who fall in the unfortunate category of being not quite poor enough, not married, not pregnant or not old

Like it or not, toll roads are in your future

2/7/2018

You know how I hate to say I told you so, but …

For years now, I have been saying that the future of highway funding in Utah must involve toll roads — lots of them, and with prices that change all day long.

And now, in a Senate floor debate on Monday that escaped the notice of most Utahns, several of the state’s leaders acknowledged this as their long-term plan.

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