October 16, 2026
The UDOT Way: What Thirty Years of Utah Transportation Projects Have Taught Me
By Carrie O’Neill
I’ve spent almost thirty years designing traffic signals in Utah, starting in 1997 with the Utah Department of Transportation’s first-ever design-build project: the I-15/SR-201 interchange everyone here calls the Spaghetti Bowl. I’m still doing this work today, now with Horner & Shifrin, and if those years have taught me one thing, it’s that UDOT approaches transportation differently than almost anywhere else, and that difference is worth understanding if you plan to do business here.
Signals that respond to real-time traffic
Start with the signals themselves. Many states run them on a fixed timer: twenty seconds of green north-south, twenty seconds east-west, all day, regardless of what’s on the road. UDOT doesn’t. Nearly every signal in the state is actuated: a camera, sensor, or LiDAR reads the intersection in real time and decides whether to hold a green or clear it, so drivers aren’t waiting on a light that can’t tell whether anyone’s there. UDOT also maintains signals for most Utah cities, so the majority of the signals statewide run through UDOT’s Traffic Operations Center, even those owned by a municipality. Call about a stuck signal, and the dispatcher is remotely into that controller before you’ve hung up, extending a green or clearing a queue on the spot.
Speed that’s built into the contracts
That responsiveness isn’t an accident. It’s structural. UDOT keeps a pre-qualified pool of designers and contractors, with pricing already negotiated and contractors who know UDOT’s standards cold. Horner & Shifrin is in that pool for traffic signals, ITS, construction engineering, and pre-construction. When a project manager calls with an urgent need, we can turn around a scope the same day, get notice to proceed in as little as two weeks, and hand a finished design straight to a contractor who can be moving dirt the next day.
UDOT backs that speed with inventory most states don’t carry: a state-furnished yard stocked with signal heads, detection equipment, and mast arms in multiple sizes. If a design calls for a 45-foot mast arm and the crew hits an unmarked utility that requires a 50-foot arm, that’s a same-day swap at the yard. Compare that to some other states that don’t have the yard or procurement contracts in place: every plan set must be built out in full, wiring details and all, and agencies pay two to three times what UDOT pays per signal and wait months for final delivery of the equipment. UDOT’s standard drawings and pre-qualified contractors let us build an abbreviated plan set instead, and that efficiency is why UDOT can build so many signals on its budget.
Where the textbook answer doesn’t apply
None of that means UDOT plays it safe. East-west traffic along the Wasatch Front has always been a hard problem, and UDOT’s answer was flex lanes: overhead gantries with green arrows and red X’s that switch a lane’s direction to match peak traffic. The first one went in years ago in Taylorsville; another is going in now near Lehi because the model worked. That took an agency, a commission, and a governor’s office all willing to fund a real pilot when conventional striping would have been the easier call.
What comes next, and why I wanted a bigger platform behind it
The relationships, the standards, the years of watching this agency solve problems its own way: that’s the experience I wanted more capacity behind as Utah heads toward 2034. The state will host the Winter Olympics again, thirty-two years after 2002, and moving that many people across Utah’s roads will take the kind of large-scale transportation planning UDOT has already proven it can deliver. That’s the growth I wanted my team ready for when we joined Horner & Shifrin: the same people and UDOT relationships we’ve built over decades, now backed by a full-service engineering firm with the bench to take on more of what’s coming.
If you’re planning transportation, ITS, or traffic signal work in Utah in the next few years, let’s talk before the RFP goes out.