For more than a century, railroad tracks have cut through the heart of our capital city. They interrupt streets, separate neighborhoods and keep downtown and the west side from ever really being one place. We’ve lived with them so long they feel like the weather — just a condition of living here.
They aren’t. They’re a choice we keep making.
Years ago, I sold food out of a stall at the Downtown Winter Farmers Market inside the Rio Grande Depot. That market helped launch my business — it’s where I learned who my customers were and whether the whole idea could actually work. I have a personal debt to that building. Before it hosted the market, it housed the Utah State Archives and the Historical Society. Before that, it was Utah’s front door, welcoming travelers arriving by rail from across the West. It’s been a lot of things this past century.
Today, one of Utah’s great civic buildings is used primarily as an occasional event space. The Rio Grande Plan offers something much more ambitious: restoring the depot as a working passenger rail station and making it the front door to a reconnected downtown once again.
Salt Lake City has been quietly preparing for this moment for more than 20 years. In the 1990s, we reconfigured freeway ramps and opened up new ground east of downtown. In the early 2000s, the city quietly assembled land west of the Depot for new development. Pioneer Park is in the middle of its own transformation right now. Housing and restaurants have filled in blocks nearby that used to sit empty.
We haven’t always finished what we started, though. Some of us remember when the state aquarium was supposed to go on that same land west of the depot before we lost it to the south end of the valley. We weren’t ready when the opportunity was. That’s the risk with big civic ambitions: They don’t wait around for us to get organized.
Piece by piece, we’ve rebuilt almost everything around the Rio Grande Depot. What remains is the barrier running through the middle of it all. The rail corridor still divides neighborhoods we’ve spent decades trying to reconnect. The Rio Grande Plan would move those tracks below grade through downtown, restore passenger service to the depot and open more than 70 acres in the heart of the city for housing, parks and the kind of street life Salt Lake City says it wants.
I understand the hesitation on cost. It’s a fair question that deserves an honest answer, not a brush-off. Projects at this scale get built through cost-sharing — federal transportation dollars, state investment, city planning and the private rail companies that own the tracks and have to be part of any deal that moves them. That’s a harder negotiation than most infrastructure debates. It’s also exactly the kind of coordination this city has proven it can do when it decides something is worth finishing.
Other cities have already run this play. Reno buried its rail corridor and reconnected a downtown that had been split for a century. Denver turned Union Station into the center of one of its best neighborhoods. Los Angeles is spending billions doing the same at a scale we’re not even close to contemplating here. The question isn’t whether this works. It’s whether we have the confidence to go do it.
In 2034, the world comes back to Salt Lake City for the Winter Olympics. Visitors will see an airport we had the nerve to build ourselves, an expanding transit system and a downtown that’s been rebuilding itself for decades. The Rio Grande corridor is the one piece of that story we haven’t finished.
As a former city councilmember, I learned that the most important public investments are rarely judged by the headlines they generate. They’re judged years later by whether they left a city stronger than they found it.
Salt Lake City has everything it needs to be one of America’s great cities. Now it’s time to act like one.
Great cities don’t think in election cycles. They think in generations. They become great because ordinary people decide the next generation deserves something better than the one they inherited, and then expect their leaders to build it.
If you believe Salt Lake City can be that kind of city, don’t let this conversation end here. Ask your mayor, your city councilmember, your state legislator and every candidate asking for your vote where they stand on the Rio Grande Plan and what they’re willing to do to make it happen. Tell them you’re ready to think bigger about the future of Salt Lake City.
Great cities think in generations. The Salt Lake City that our grandchildren inherit will be shaped by the choices we make today.
(Derek Kitchen) Derek Kitchen is a former Salt Lake City Council member, former Utah state senator, and co-founder of Laziz Kitchen.
