Salt Lake City’s Sugar House streetcar is expanding. Spanning two miles and taking about 10 minutes to ride, the S-Line connects Fairmont Park with the greater TRAX system at Central Pointe Station.
The Sugar House neighborhood continues to grow and Fairmont Park was never meant to be the end of the line.
Thanks to $12 million in state funding allocated in 2021, Salt Lake City and the Utah Transit Authority are set to expand the line east to the intersection of Simpson Avenue and Highland Drive. That extra 900 feet will connect even more residents and businesses.
“I use it every day because I go to work,” said 22-year-old Abdul Sarware.
First opened in 2013, the streetcar is essential for riders like Sarware who live in the numerous apartment buildings along the corridor. Riders use it to commute to work, access grocery stores and retail shops and connect to other transit lines that take them throughout the Wasatch Front.
“The goal of this extension is really just to help improve visibility of the line,” city transportation engineer Lynn Jacobs told the Redevelopment Agency of Salt Lake City during an April 16 meeting. “There was always an intent to carry it further in Sugar House, and this fortunately gave us an opportunity to take it about one more block into Sugar House.”
In addition to the extension, the line will also be double tracked between 500 and 700 East, providing an opportunity for more frequent service and fewer delays as the neighborhood develops.
Sugar House didn’t always have multi-story housing and a sprawling commercial center, though.
“Fifteen years ago, it was pretty quiet,” said Sugar House Community Council member Heidi Schubert. “There were a lot of small, privately owned, or at least privately rented, little tiny shops and the library was always a main focus of our entry into [the neighborhood].”
Development in the neighborhood core around the intersection of 2100 South and 1100 East didn’t really take off until after the 2008 financial crisis, Schubert said. It’s been full steam ahead ever since with much of the area now developed into apartment buildings, commercial spaces and even a large University of Utah Health center, which opened in 2019.
“Certainly the biggest growing pain is the traffic,” she said. “But I have to say that in the last two years, which is fresh in everyone's memory, the growing pains are due to the construction and not the actual roads themselves.”
Still, many commuters use the neighborhood as a southern entry point into the city and traffic has only gotten worse in recent years. Even with the streetcar expansion, regular riders like Sarware still feel the allure of driving.
“I plan to buy a car in maybe three to four months,” he said. “Having a car is better, I can go whenever and wherever I want.”
For others, like Schubert, widespread adoption of public transit could help some of those growing traffic woes – because the high density apartments are “really critical for all the young people who would access new jobs or the university itself.”
“We also need better transit so that when you do live further away, you can still get into these little niche locations.”
According to UTA, construction could begin as soon as this summer with service to the new station beginning in 2026.
