July 23, 2026
The Work Before the Work: How Early Learning Builds Better Projects
By Mitch Schwab, Field Engineer at Stacy Witbeck
There's a version of infrastructure work where the schedule is the enemy, and every day is a fight to catch up. That wasn't our experience on Midvalley Express. As the field engineer, I watched us move eight months ahead of schedule, a position that came with a kind of pressure nobody warns you about.
Midvalley Express is a bus rapid transit (BRT) line that connects West Valley Central Station to Murray Central Station across 7 miles, with a stop serving Salt Lake Community College’s Taylorsville campus. It's UTA’s third BRT route, following the Ogden Express. We built 1.4 miles of exclusive bus lanes and 25 new stations, coordinating across a state agency and three cities.
Early in the project, an FTA funding delay pushed our schedule back a few months. That delay gave us time to order materials early and secure approval for submittals well before we needed them on site.
That head start built momentum. We held biweekly stakeholder meetings and ran weekly schedule syncs. We also caught a break with a light winter that let us keep building through months we’d normally lose. Every one of those wins compounded. Before we knew it, we had pushed the project 8 months ahead of plan.
Here’s the part you don’t expect: staying ahead can be harder than catching up. There are always unknowns in construction, and every one of them threatens to eat into the lead you've built.
When the project accelerated faster than we'd planned, every part of the job had to accelerate with it. Crews needed direction, materials needed to arrive, and stakeholders needed answers faster. I felt like I was flying by the seat of my pants for some of it, working to keep pace with a schedule that kept moving up on its own.
Falling behind gives you a clear problem to solve. Staying ahead gives you a moving target, and you're the one who has to keep hitting it.
We built the systems to match our pace: regular schedule syncs and crews who trusted the plan in front of them, even as it kept shifting. That discipline is what turned an early head start into a finished project 8 months ahead of schedule and under budget.
We opened Midvalley Express to riders in April 2026, connecting commuters and students across Murray, Taylorsville, and West Valley City. As of June 2026, bus ridership is near pre-pandemic levels.
It's better to be on this end of the completion date than the other side.