A Cyclist Was Killed on 800 South
On the evening of August 25, 2026, a cyclist riding westbound on 800 South was struck by a car at the intersection with 1000 East and died at the scene. The driver stayed at the scene and is reportedly cooperating with police. It happened about a mile from the mouth of Emigration Canyon, on one of the only streets many Salt Lake cyclists have to actually reach the mountains at all.
That's the point of this project, restated in the worst possible way. Salt Lake City has very few corridors where a cyclist isn't sharing a travel lane with cars moving 30 to 40 miles an hour. For most of us, "ride to the canyons" means picking the least-bad arterial and hoping. A death like this isn't a freak event so much as the predictable output of that arrangement, repeated enough times.
It's also not an abstract ask. The exact stretch that would give Wasatch Front cyclists an alternative — from Mountain Dell up to Parleys Summit — already has a name in state planning: UDOT's Utah Trail Network Master Plan designates it R2-046, Parley's Trail Gap, a Proposed Gap Closure. The piece connecting it down to the valley floor is mapped too, as a Proposed Vision Corridor. Building it wouldn't fix every dangerous street in the city. It would mean a cyclist heading toward Emigration or Parleys had somewhere to go that isn't defined by traffic.
Cyclists vote. So do the people who love them. If you want to do something concrete with that, the How to Help page has the specific offices and officials worth contacting about moving R2-046 from mapped to funded.
Source: Salt Lake Tribune, "SLC cyclists raise safety concerns after bicyclist killed on 800 South"