Traffic in Heber is a mess. Heber’s Main Street is also Highway 40, a very busy highway connecting the Uintah basin with the Wasatch Front. There’s a lot of general traffic, and a steady parade of oil tanker trucks that ultimately provide the gasoline the rest of the traffic is burning while idling in the traffic jam. The traffic is heavy, loud, and full of diesel smoke, all combining to make Heber’s otherwise inviting Main Street feel hostile.  I vaguely remember Heber’s Main Street as two lanes with trees lining it and a grass area separating the road from the sidewalk. We used to walk from my grandmother’s house to Main Street to get ice cream, and crossing U.S. 40 was no big deal. But those days are long gone.For a very long time, there has been a discussion about building a bypass road to divert the traffic off Main Street and skirt it around Heber. It’s been under discussion for so long that a baby born when it was first proposed is now driving one of the cars suck stuck in the traffic.  There are a lot of reasons for the delay. Heber, Midway and Wasatch County all have somewhat competing interests in where the road gets located, and they all think it would be a great idea as long as it’s in one of the other’s backyards instead of theirs.  They all want the road, just somewhere else.  There is broad community support for preserving the North Fields, the big open meadow that has visually defined Heber Valley’s landscape forever. The view across the North Fields to Timpanogos is kind of the essence of Heber Valley. Paving that doesn’t have a lot of appeal. UDOT, of course, never saw an open field that couldn’t be improved with a highway hacked down the middle of it. UDOT proposed five alternative routes back in 2022. None of them was really appealing, and the local entities couldn’t agree on a preferred option. So nothing happened.  And then on Oct. 9, UDOT finally made the big reveal of their preferred alternative. It was something of a shocker. UDOT announced that none of the alternatives was viable. The rate of growth has exceeded anything they imagined, and all of the proposed solutions are already obsolete before they have progressed beyond the sketch stage. The solution will be “much more painful,” said the UDOT planner.  Suddenly the conversation is about a freeway design with frontage roads and overpasses. A big swath of land.  The available land to build such a hideous roadway on is rapidly being developed, so the potential right of way is disappearing faster than UDOT can plan, which is admittedly a low bar. The problem, it seems, is as unfixable as Park City’s daily mess on S.R. 248.At least nobody in Wasatch County is talking about replacing the oil tankers with a gondola. There was a proposal 10 years ago to build another pipeline between the oil fields and the refineries in Salt Lake. That ended when they started pricing out the right of way purchase through Snyderville. The growth on the Wasatch Back has not only exceeded our ability to provide services to it, it’s exceeded our ability to even plan it because by the time a plan is made, conditions on the ground have made it obsolete. “Rural residential” zoning in Kimball Junction? Not so much.  Heber City is apparently willing to annex anything it can and approve pretty much anything asked for. Wasatch County hasn’t pulled back on growth in the county. And MIDA operates in a world of its own, unaccountable to anybody. The issues are regional. The management is parochial. The rare communications between the local entities are routed through the Swedish Embassy as best I can tell.The admission from UDOT that they have no viable options for the Heber bypass road is very unusual. UDOT is the kind of agency that, like the Pentagon, believes itself to be infallible. It doesn’t throw in the towel. There is an engineering solution to everything — until one day there just isn’t. A 10-mile tunnel under Heber isn’t an option. The alignment of U.S. 40 was ruled out as a railroad route a hundred years ago because it’s too steep. So it’s really game over. We can’t fix the traffic because it is growing faster than we can build roads, and nobody wants to see more roads built even if we had places to put them. Which we mostly don’t because we keep building houses in the way.   We lack the political will to shut down the growth that is overwhelming services and eroding the rural lifestyle away. When was the last time you saw a proposal to down-zone anything? So the Highway 40 traffic in Heber spills over into the parallel residential streets changing the character of those neighborhoods. And the morning crush on S.R. 248 backs up farther and farther every day. Whatever was accomplished with all the digging at Quinn’s Junction will be immediately undone by putting a Maverik station in the thick of it.The theory seems to be that we can keep growing because everybody will start riding the bus. That only solves the problem if each passenger takes a 55 gallon drum of crude oil on board with them. It maybe can’t be “fixed,” but I keep wondering if we couldn’t at least quit deliberately making it worse.Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986.The post More Dogs on Main: UDOT throws in the towel appeared first on Park Record.