LEGENDS OF THE SPRAWL; SALT LAKE CITY AND MILWAUKEE GO IN OPPOSITE DIRECTIONS WITH HIGHWAYS.

Byline: Timothy Egan

EVEN a thousand feet above the valley, from the peak where Brigham Young mapped out his Mormon empire in 1847, one of the largest public works projects in the nation dominates the briny expanse of the Great Basin. Two thousand workers are pouring concrete around the clock, turning six lanes of Interstate 15 into 12 lanes through Salt Lake City and its loping suburbs.

And no sooner will the $1.6 billion expansion be completed in two years, state officials say, when they will need a new, parallel highway to keep traffic moving along the 100 miles of the Wasatch Mountain front, where most of Utah's 2.1 million people live.

The Salt Lake metropolitan area is growing by 1,000 acres a month, much of it to the alarm of Utah's political and business leaders. But almost by default, in a blitz of highway construction, the state's leaders are encouraging the very thing they say they do not want: the instant towns of one-acre housing lots and no sidewalks, the car-dependent office parks and big box stores in a sea of pavement, the brown air that obscures the mountains.

More than a thousand miles away, in Milwaukee, a city that expanded along the lines of its highways a generation ago, sledgehammers of regret will soon begin swinging. The city plans to use more than $20 million in federal transportation money to tear down a half-built section of highway that was supposed to cut right through old Milwaukee. It will be the nation's largest highway deconstruction project.

``The urban superhighway should be relegated to the scrap heap of history,'' said John O. Norquist, Milwaukee's three-term mayor, who toured the country recently to make his case that cities should be removing highways, not building new ones. There is no greater form of subsidized social engineering than the interstate highway, Norquist says, which hastens flight out of the city without doing much to ease traffic congestion.

Salt Lake City and Milwaukee, two cities with roughly equal metropolitan populations (about 1.5 million), each having declared war on sprawl, are examples of how federal transportation subsidies are still one of the biggest forces shaping urban areas.

For all the debate over the quality of life in America's gangly new suburbs, and the effort by politicians such as Vice President Al Gore and New Jersey Gov. Christie Whitman to make it a national issue, highways can reshape communities in dramatic fashion, often with little public input. These two urban areas are using federal highway money to go in opposite directions, Salt Lake to speed people into and out of the city, Milwaukee to restore a neighborhood and revive city life.

While Gore has trumpeted the Clinton administration's plan to preserve open space with tax credits worth $700 million, the federal government is offering cities and states $162 billion over the next five years for building, maintaining and expanding roads. The money is from the largest public works bill ever made law, last year's $217 billion transportation bill.

Much of the money from that bill, after a change in policy under President George Bush in 1991, can be used for commuter rail systems, subways, bike paths, even tearing down highways. But most of it will be used to serve cars. And whether a highway is widened or torn down, aimed at the center of a city or routed around it, it shapes destiny.

In Salt Lake, for example, new subdivisions are already rising in the open spaces through which Gov. Michael O. Leavitt has proposed the Legacy Highway to parallel I-15.

In Milwaukee, a neighborhood of new housing, restaurants, shops and a theme park is taking shape in what will no longer be the path of the Park East Freeway, the one to be demolished. In this case, the market is following the highway's elimination.

By plot and lot, not design

More than most cities in the American West, Salt Lake was carefully planned from inception, its blocks and avenues plotted with geometric precision, its neighborhoods zoned to reflect village atmosphere and to enhance the communal economics of the Mormon pioneers.

In some ways the city is still like a big small town. But Salt Lake is on its way to becoming a Phoenix of the Wasatch range, bordered by new suburbs whose only connection to one another are the highways.

Few people in Salt Lake seem to want this. Leavitt, a two-term Republican, has proclaimed that the Beehive State ``will no longer subsidize urban sprawl'' - at least as a deliberate strategy. But indirectly, Utah seems to be doing just that.

New highway projects, combined with local zoning that virtually mandates big lots and big houses, are adding more helium to the balloon of Greater Salt Lake. The metropolitan area is projected to double in size, to more than 800 square miles, by 2020, while the population grows 50 percent. Some people whose lives are in the path of urbanization are bitter at the government's role.

``We have 300 acres of prime dairy land, and there is nothing my family would like better than keep milking cows on this land,'' said Carolynn Gibson, whose family operates a dairy farm, which began as a homestead, about 30 miles north of Salt Lake City.

But the pressures to sell out are enormous. Hardly a week goes by when the family is not offered a windfall to sell its acreage to a developer.

What has made grazing land look appealing to house builders, driving up property values around the Gibson farm, is Leavitt's proposed Legacy Highway, which ultimately would run more than 100 miles, north and south.

Farmers oppose the highway because it could wipe out up to half of the region's 43 remaining dairy farms. Two federal agencies also oppose it, saying the highway would cut through what biologists consider some of the most important inland bird-breeding grounds in the Western Hemisphere.

``We could make a ton of money and just quit the sweat,'' Gibson said. ``But there's something about the sense of it. It makes no sense to keep putting pavement over farmland.''

But from his capitol office in Salt Lake City, Leavitt, a descendant of pioneer stock, looks at a map of the narrow Wasatch Front - mountains on one side, a salty lake or marsh on the other - and asks, ``Where are we going to put all these new people?''

Utah has the nation's highest birth rate, averaging 20 births per 1,000 people in the 1990s, more than double the average. The state is projected to add a million people in the next 20 years, more than 70 percent from births, and 2 million more by 2050. Dairy farms could be a luxury, the governor says.

The state's political climate, distrusting anything that smacks of government planning, has made it impossible to pass limits on growth. The Legislature did enact a Quality Growth Act this year, establishing a commission to recommend policies, but as its own preamble says, it ``mandates nothing.''

Critics of Utah's growth say there is a contradiction: While the governor says he wants growth to be guided by the free market, his $10 billion in highway construction plans are a giant government push for growth up and down the Wasatch range.

``What we have done over the last 50 years with the federal highway system is subsidize the worst kind of sprawl,'' said Robert Adler, a professor of law at the University of Utah. ``In building these roads, you skew people's choices.''

When the governor invited Utah residents to offer their opinions on growth as part of the Quality Growth process, more than 17,000 people filled out questionnaires. Few responding to the unscientific survey said they wanted to continue in the direction the state was headed, with big lots, no farmland protection and total dependence on cars.

A majority of those who responded said they preferred houses on smaller lots, just under a third of an acre, near rail or transit lines, in neighborhoods with a mix of small businesses and town houses.

But local zoning codes and the subsidies for new roads make it difficult to create those neighborhoods.

As in most American suburbs, zoning codes in Utah keep businesses apart from housing to protect property values and minimize traffic. One result, though, is that residents are forced into cars for even small errands.

But with one-acre zoning, a million more people, at four per household, would consume most of the open space left in the Salt Lake Valley, according to Envision Utah, a group set up by business and political leaders to guide the state on growth.

``There is a disconnect between cause and effect,'' said Stephen Holbrook, executive director of the group.

As in many other parts of the country, builders who try to design more compact developments are stymied.

Saving time or costing time?

Among mayors, traffic engineers and other people who are passionate about urban design's influence on people, there is a vigorous debate over whether building new highways causes people to drive more, adding to congestion rather than reducing it.

The arguments boil down to this: When a new road is built, people take trips that they otherwise might not have taken. New homes, businesses and stores brought on by the highway will appear, and it will soon be clogged.

But if the crowded highway is removed, or not widened, people will find other ways to get around, taking public transit, side roads, walking or biking - anything to save time.

Recent studies in England and California support the theory that new roads add to overall driving time, concluding that every 10 percent increase in highway capacity produces at least a 5 percent net increase in driving time.

Supporters of this theory point to San Francisco, where the Embarcadero Freeway along the waterfront, damaged in the 1989 earthquake, was removed; or Portland, Ore., where a six-lane highway was torn down and replaced with a downtown park; or New York, where the West Side Highway was closed after a collapse. In all three cases, traffic in the area of the highway fell when it was taken out of use.

``We have all this experience over the last 20 years, from Los Angeles to Atlanta to Phoenix, that shows that building and widening freeways do not solve our traffic problems,'' said Keith Bartholomew, a professor at the Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources and the Environment at the University of Utah, ``and yet here we are in Utah saying somehow this time it has to work.''

If the new highway will not reduce traffic, why build it? Leavitt says he has no choice: The millions of new people in Utah will have to get around somehow, and the overwhelming majority of people - as much as 97 percent, according to some surveys - will not use mass transit.

Even cities that have embraced rail transit have not noticeably reduced traffic congestion. Americans prefer their cars.

Still, others wonder if there is a way to accommodate people's preference for the automobile without encouraging a runaway metropolis. A city left to true market forces, not shaped by government subsidies for either highways or railways, might take an entirely different shape.

Tully, the Salt Lake developer, says current trends indicate that 70 percent of new housing in the region is likely to be outside the Salt Lake City limits. If the Legacy Highway were not built, he said, it would be closer to 50 percent, because many developers would look at building housing in underused sections of the city.

A setback for cars

In Milwaukee, Norquist has spent more than a decade trying to keep the federal government from influencing the place known as ``Brew City USA.'' Unlike most Democrats, the mayor opposes federal money for housing, highways, education and welfare. The money is virtually free, so cities take it. But they do so at their peril, he argues in his book, ``The Wealth of Cities,'' published last year by Addison-Wesley.

Cities like Detroit, St. Louis and Cleveland lost people and neighborhoods to interstate highways, Norquist said. In Milwaukee, which is surrounded by highways going every direction, the African-American section of the city and the old Italian neighborhoods were wiped out by highway construction in the 1960s, he says. Shopping centers and sizable numbers of people in the metropolitan area followed the highways west, north and south.

``All this sprawl was subsidized,'' said Norquist, sitting in his office in the 105-year-old City Hall, a Flemish Renaissance design topped by a clock tower 400 feet above the sidewalk. ``Sprawl is the direct result of accommodating the automobile.''

Other urban experts say suburban development is the price for creating the world's first mass middle class. The highway follows public sentiment, they argue.

``You're saying people can go out and have a quarter-acre, half-acre, an acre, build their own house, maybe put a little swimming pool in it, all the things they want, and we call it bad, nasty sprawl,'' Ben Wattenberg, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute has written. ``Why don't we call it great?''

Norquist says he is not against all highways, just those that slice up cities. He points to Canada, where the federal government does not pay for urban highways, and cities like Vancouver and Toronto have responded with a mix of transportation systems that preserve their neighborhoods.

Nor is he against the suburbs, where nearly half of all Americans now live. But as a big-city mayor, trying to enliven parts of central Milwaukee that once pulsed with commerce and housing, Norquist has a natural bias.

One of the final links of the long-term highway plan for Milwaukee called for the Park East Freeway to cut across the northern edge of downtown, across the Milwaukee River to Lake Michigan. While the part that was built is still in use, neighborhood opposition killed construction of the second half, and now the mayor has obtained money to tear down the part that was built.

The mayor views what has happened since the highway was halted as a sort of laboratory for his theory that cities will develop naturally without federal highway subsidies. At the point where the highway was brought to a standstill, a cluster of new housing has arisen, in a neighborhood that includes John Ernst Cafe, Milwaukee's oldest German restaurant. Children ride bikes with cards pinned to the wheels for motorized effect, the elderly play chess in a new pocket park and people carry groceries home from a supermarket at the center of East Pointe Commons housing development.

It is the kind of neighborhood favored by the so-called New Urbanists, a group of architects, planners and others who advocate more compact development. The neighborhood is not for everybody, says Norquist, but by stopping the highway, the city has allowed people to make a choice. There is no subsidy either way.

As the highways carried people away from the city, the new suburbs have tended to zone out the kind of things that make a neighborhood interesting, Norquist said, echoing the sentiments of Tully in Utah. He points to cozy old streets in Milwaukee, where people live in apartments that are directly above storefronts, and walk to schools and businesses.

``This used to be Main Street, USA,'' Norquist said. ``It's now a code violation all over America.''

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3 Photos

Photo: (1--Color) Keith Bartholomew believes Salt Lake City is poised to repeat the mistakes of Los Angeles by building more highways.

Tom Smart/The New York Times

(2--Color) Mayor John Norquist of Milwaukee thinks cities should remove highways.

(3) Traffic makes its way past construction on Interstate 15 in Salt Lake City, where six lanes are being expanded to 12.

Todd Buchanan/The New York Times