The intersection had an unusually high number of crashes, so Utah wanted to do something about it.
Not far from the mouth of Sardine Canyon, State Route 23, which doubles as Wellsville’s Center Street, meets U.S. Highway 89/91. The national road is often cruised by drivers still riding the high of coasting through the canyon or gearing up to face its winding roads.
Between 2019 and 2023, the Utah Department of Transportation found that 51 crashes happened within a half-mile of that intersection. Nine happened at the crossing itself, and one of those was fatal.
“Any time that we have any kind of significant crash on any of our roads, we immediately kind of put that area under a microscope,” said UDOT spokesperson Mitch Shaw. “Cache County isn’t the small, little rural community that it once was.”
So, to make the crossing safer, Shaw said the department decided to build a traffic feature that hadn’t yet been used in Utah — a restricted crossing U-turn. Traffic engineers call it an RCUT.
The new intersection mechanism, finished on Sept. 22, means that people on Wellsville’s Center Street will no longer be able to turn left onto U.S. 89/91, or cross its five lanes of traffic all at once. Instead, people who wish to do so must turn right and make a U-turn at a designated spot.
This, according to Shaw, simplifies the process of navigating the intersection. Drivers, he explained, no longer have to navigate several lanes of fast traffic all at once, but can instead make a simple right turn and then decide on the timing of their U-turn.
“If you’re at a stop sign, and you’re sitting there waiting, the more and more you have to wait, it’s like a direct correlation between waiting and your decision making becoming kind of impaired,” he said. “You make worse decisions.”
While they’re new to Utah, Shaw said RCUTs have been used and tested in other states, and he mentioned that UDOT is already looking to incorporate them in other places.
The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration has found that using RCUTS at intersections where minor roads meet bigger highways can reduce the number of crashes that cause injuries or fatalities by over 50%.
Community concerns
Still, not everyone in Wellsville is convinced that an RCUT is the best solution for the busy intersection.
Though the city doesn’t have an official stance on the UDOT project, Mayor Chad Lindley offered his own concerns about the project, as well as what he’s heard from constituents.
“Honestly, we wanted a structure. We wanted an overpass, underpass structure,” he said.
And though UDOT’s plans to construct a pedestrian underpass at the intersection makes him feel better about the crossing, he still isn’t convinced the RCUT was the best way to manage traffic.
“We still believe that that’s the best solution for that intersection,” he said, referring to a full overpass for cars. “We also believe that the state — with cost analysis and everything else — didn’t believe that was practical at the time.”
Lindley said the RCUT makes the intersection better than it was before, but he worries that it’s only a short-term solution for the busy crossing that will only see more traffic as Wellsville continues to grow.
“A structure there would have been a long-term solution,” he said. “By long term, I’m saying probably 50 years.”
He also worries that people will begin to avoid the intersection altogether, and instead cross or turn onto U.S. 89/91 using other rural Wellsville roads.
And even though UDOT designed the RCUT to fit farm equipment and trucks with trailers, Lindley said the farmers he knows are still wary of the intersection.
“The farmers that I visit with will not use the RCUT,” he said. “I think the issue with the farm equipment is their speeds are much slower.”
He also had heard about a crash that happened at the intersection since the RCUT opened.
“I’m very much in a wait-and-see attitude with it,” Lindley said. “I don’t live far from that intersection. I don’t see larger vehicles using it.”
Utah Highway Patrol Lt. Zach Randall confirmed that there had been a collision in the intersection on Sept. 23. According to Randall, the car was turning off of U.S. 89/91 and onto Wellsville’s Center Street — a move that doesn’t require drivers to use the RCUT’s U-turns — when the driver entered the median too soon, before driving over a raised concrete island and hitting a traffic sign. In an email, Randall said contributing circumstances were listed on the report as “disregarded roadway markings,” and not the new road configuration.
The state-run Utah Crash Data Portal indicates it was a single-vehicle crash that didn’t cause any injuries.
Backing the RCUT
Even if there are still fender-benders at the intersection, Shaw said the RCUT can help eliminate dangerous T-bone-type crashes.
And despite the community’s concerns, Shaw said the RCUT was the best option for the intersection from both a financial and practical standpoint.
“This project cost like $6.3 million,” he said. “A whole interchange — it totally depends — but usually they’re at least $100 million.”
Additionally, he said the RCUT made less of an environmental impact than a full interchange would have.
And even though the community may eventually outgrow the solution, he said UDOT takes growth models into account when considering how to best manage traffic.
“We are one of the fastest-growing states in the nation right now,” Shaw said. “It is normal to have something in there that is going to last 25, 30 years. That’s completely normal, standard operation.”
If UDOT looked too far out, he said the department would face unfeasible bills and would risk populations growing in unpredicted ways. The current RCUT, he said, is estimated to be in place until about 2050.
And while some might look for different routes to avoid using the RCUT, Shaw said there’s only so much UDOT can do to encourage people to use the intersection, which he said will likely allow for faster crossings and left turns than were possible before.
“We have limited control of what people are going to do on the road,” he said. “We can’t hold everyone’s hand and make them do exactly what they’re supposed to, we can only provide them with the infrastructure for them to do that, and that’s what we’ve done here.”
