Pub. 1 2018-2019 Issue 3

15 UCTURE of lane miles has only increased by 6 percent. In contrast, population growth has increased 60 percent and travel miles have increased by approx- imately 80 percent. It is going to be a continuing challenge to keep up with all that growth. • According to the infrastructure report card, the last statewide plan for solid andhazard- ous plan was published in 2007. Utah households were gen- erating 4.57 pounds of waste per person in 2012, of which only half a pound per person was being recycled. Utah has 107 solidwaste landfills that have a permit, 22 compost facil- ities, and 11 recycling facilities. Four incinerators are availa- ble to burn industrial, medical, and municipal waste. • UtahTransit Authority providesmost of themass transit along theWasatch Front, which is where 80 percent of Utah’s pop- ulation is located. It has benefited from federal funding that allowed it to increase the system’s capacity. Increasing the number of passengers has been hampered by a sluggish economy, and changes to land planning have also been slow. The main people likely to use mass transit are those who are either young or old, and that will likely become even more so during the coming decades as the baby boomgeneration ages. The main challenges mass transit faces in Utah have to dowithmaintaining and upgrading the current system, oper- ating it efficiently, and setting the cost of tickets correctly. Why does infrastructure matter? There are a couple of big reasons: • A deteriorating infrastructure is more dangerous than one in good condition because at some point it will fail. That can mean people being killed or injured. • It wastes time and resources. For example, when traffic is slow, drivers sit in their cars for hours and burn billions of dollars’ worth of precious, nonrenewable fuel while going absolutely nowhere. Fixing problems before they become dire is cheaper and smarter than waiting for a catastrophe to occur. Although no politician is likely to embrace the cost of renewing infra- structure, those who do are showing the kind of wisdom that ought to be rewarded at the ballot box. 3 Fixing problems before they become dire is cheaper and smarter than waiting for a catastrophe to occur.