Turning sidewalk gaps into a connected trail network

Millcreek became a city in 2016. Salt Lake County had already studied parts of its sidewalk and trail network before that. The city General Plan added more. A later study collected the material into an appendix of about sixty maps. The appendix was complete and it was accurate. It was not ready for a decision. A director could not look at it and see where the city intends to build.

This work replaced that appendix with one citywide map. The map shows where the Public Works and Planning departments intend to build. It connects parks, schools, and the denser parts of the city.

Three kinds of path

The map separates three kinds of path, because each one costs a different amount and serves a different trip.

• A shared-use path carries people who walk and people who ride bicycles. It is separate from the road.
• An enhanced urban path sits between a sidewalk and a shared-use path. It is wider than a standard sidewalk. It adds a planted park strip and a bicycle lane.
• A trail is an unpaved or natural-surface route.

The map also shows waterways, trailheads, parks, pedestrian districts, and village centers. It marks three activity areas: City Center, Meadowbrook, and the Southern Gateway.

The data behind the map

A gap analysis needs to know where sidewalks already exist. Millcreek keeps a sidewalk centerline dataset for this. A centerline is a line drawn along the middle of a feature. The city built the dataset from earlier shapefiles and from aerial imagery. Machine learning models read the imagery and find the sidewalks. This method covers a whole city for much less than a field survey costs.

Millcreek publishes this data for anyone to use, on the Millcreek open data site. The city gives no guarantee of accuracy or fitness for a purpose, and it can change the data at any time. The data is mapping grade, not survey grade.

The prior studies each measured gaps a different way. This work rebuilt those formulas as one method. Every part of the city is now measured the same way, so a reader can compare one area against another.

Who did the work

I built the GIS data and the cartography. Aubrey Larsen of Landmark Design did the graphic design and the illustration. Fred Lutze, PE, set the direction and reviewed the work throughout. The City of Millcreek owns the plan.

Where the plan stands

The plan came from a grant. In April 2023 the Millcreek Council accepted a Transportation and Land Use Connection grant from the Wasatch Front Regional Council. The council contributed $219,845 and the city matched $70,155, for a project budget of $290,000. That grant paid for the planning study and closed in June 2025.

The city produced this map after that. The Planning department and Landmark Design used about $10,000 of existing budget for the cartography and the design. The plan is in a rewrite now, and this map is part of it. The city has not adopted the new plan yet.

The Bonneville Shoreline Trail

One target on the map is the Bonneville Shoreline Trail. The planned trail runs about 280 miles along the Wasatch Front, from the Idaho border to Nephi. About 170 miles exist today, in sections that do not yet connect. The Millcreek segment is short, and it sits in one of the most populated parts of the route.

Part of the route crossed the Mount Olympus Wilderness, which the US Forest Service manages. Federal law does not permit bicycles in a designated wilderness area. In December 2022 Congress passed the Bonneville Shoreline Trail Advancement Act. The act moved about 326 acres out of wilderness at about 20 places near neighborhoods. It added the same amount of land in Mill Creek Canyon to the Mount Olympus Wilderness. That change makes the Millcreek connection possible.

What the map cannot show

The map shows intent. It does not show a schedule or a budget. A line on the map does not mean that the city has funded that segment or set a date for it. Condition is also outside the map. A sidewalk can exist and still fail an accessibility standard.

Recognition

Esri selected the map as a finalist in the Envisioning the Future category of the 2026 User Conference Virtual Map Gallery.

Sources: Millcreek Resolution 23-14, April 10, 2023, for the grant amounts. The Bonneville Shoreline Trail Advancement Act, December 2022, for the wilderness boundary change. Trail mileage from published reports of trail status in 2025.