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Show Highway Department Awards $36 Million In Contracts in '61 More than $36 million in highway high-way construction contracts were awarded during the year 1961, according to C. Taylor Burton Director of Highways. Of the more than one hundred construction construc-tion projects underway during the year, 69 were completed before be-fore winter brought a halt to most construction activities. Interstate Highway construction construc-tion seventy-nine miles of it took about three-fourths of the construction funds, or more than $30 million. Already completed and open to traffic by ' the end of 1961 were 73 miles of Interstate Inter-state superhighway throughout the state, at a completion cost of $23,576,000. Segments of the completed freeways are now found in eleven counties in Utah; Box Elder, Morgan, Summit, Salt Lake, Davis, Tooele, Utah, Green River, Beaver, Washington and Grand. Still under construction throughout the state are projects totaling an additional 56 miles of freeway at a cost of $24 million. Besides the more spectacular Interstate Highway construction activity, the regular construction projects on the primary, secondary, sec-ondary, urban and state highway systems also continued at a rapid pace during the past year. Ten million dollars during fiscal 1961 went for these non-Interstate Highways. Some of the biggest big-gest of these jobs were improvements improve-ments or new construction of U.S. 50 6 near Castle Gate in Carbon County; 7th East and the Cottonwood Diagonal in Salt Lake City; a new road through Capitol Reef National Monument in Wayne County; Harrisville Road in Weber County; other projects near the Arizona State Line; in Gold Bar Canyon near Dead Horse Point in Grand County; at Magna-Garfield and the Kennecott Copper Industrial Plant in Salt Lake County; and the "Defense Road" near the Thiokol Chemical Plant northwest north-west of Brigham City in Box Elder County. Major structures, principally for Interstate Highways, High-ways, were constructed throughout through-out the state, the largest being a $654,000 span more than 600 feet long at South Temple Street and 6th West in Salt Lake City. Bids were also let for the longest single span bridge in the state up to the present time (550-foot single-span) to be built over Cart Creek near Flaming Gorge Damsite in northeastern Utah. Maintenance activities, accounted ac-counted for the second largest expenditure, next to construction, construc-tion, in the highway program of the state. A total of $5,170,000 was spent for maintenance of state highway during calendar year 1961. No federal aid is re-cieved re-cieved for maintenance purposes all of the money coming from state highway users' taxes. State maintenance forces have ever-increasing ever-increasing duties including shoulder line painting, weed control, care of roadside rest areas, trash barrel maintenance, snow removal and sanding slick roads, in addition to "regular" activities of maintaining the surfacing sur-facing of state highways. When completed, in the early 1970's, the Interstate System of National Defense Highways, as the freeways are officially called, will total 934 miles of divided super-highways, bisecting the state from north to south (Interstate (Inter-state Highway 15); from east to west in the northern part of the state (Interstate 80 and 80N); from east to west in the center of the state (1-70, linking Denver with 1-15); and the Salt Lake City Belt Route (1-215 and 1-415, encircling the capital for a distance dis-tance of 29 miles). Nationally the system will consist of 41,000 miles of controlled-access divided highway to cost about one million mil-lion dollars per mile, of $41 billion. bil-lion. When the system is finished, twelve to fifteen years from now. a motorist will be able to travel from one end of the state of Utah, or from one part of the country to another without ever meeting a stop sign. Thousands of accidents will be prevented annually, and money savings in fuel consumption and time saved will more than pay for the entire highway network in a few years. |
