With many folks hitting the road this weekend as the summer travel season gets going, a listener had the question – which roads in northern Utah are the most difficult or expensive to maintain?

On KVNU’s For the People program this past Wednesday, Utah Department of Transportation Region 1 spokesperson Zach Whitney said – it depends.

“And especially when you’re talking about roads, there are so many different variables. We keep track of our pavement conditions as we call it. We have those statistics that people can pull up on the website, we track the pavement conditions.

“But it all depends on the weather, and it depends on how many cars are driving on that road, and it depends on how heavy those cars are. And it depends on the durability of the material that was used,” he explained.

Whitney said that mountain highways and passes, such as through Sardine and Logan Canyons, do pose a more complex challenge, especially in the winter.

“UDOT, as a whole, budgets about $24 million for snow removal at an average about a million dollars per storm. We look at storms over the past 20 years and say ‘well, we average about 24 storms a season’.”

As far as the SR-30 project is concerned, the Valley View Highway, Whitney said they hope to see movement on that in a couple years. He admitted it is slow going with the environmental process.

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