The street Sunset
The city government wrote the destruction of the east side of Main Street into its own plan
Main Street has a west side and not much else.
Main Street through Sunset is State Route 126, whatever the city's own website says, and Interstate 15 runs about forty to eighty metres behind its east curb for the full length of the city. The general plan Sunset's council adopted on 15 November 2022 says the 1960s corridor required the destruction of the east side of the street and substantially changed the character of the city. This is the route number settled, the traffic measured, the second state route named, and the plan for what is left described as exactly what it is.
Sunset sits at the top of Davis County, a long drive north of the Southern Utah ground I actually work, so these pages are researched rather than lived. What is on them was read where it is issued: the city's own website and the general plan its council adopted, published on the state public notice website; the North Davis Fire District and the North Davis Sewer District; the Davis County Assessor's parcel roll; the Census Bureau's geocoder and its 2020 block file; and the state's own roads and municipal boundary layers. Every figure carries the date it was checked. A Davis County partner agent takes the ground level work.
The live question
Is Main Street SR-26 or SR-126, and why does the city's own website give the answer the state data does not?
It is SR-126, and three sources settle it, all checked on 16 August 2026. The state's roads layer, which carries the transportation department's own route attributes, returns a highway name of SR 126 and a route name of 0126P for every Main Street segment inside Sunset. The general plan the council adopted on 15 November 2022 says it twice, once naming "Main Street/SR 126" as its example of an arterial street and once saying that Main Street and 1800 North are designated state routes. That is the state and the city's own governing document in agreement.
The other figure comes from one sentence on one city web page. The city information page lists SR-126 as running adjacent to the city and calls SR-26 the city's Main Street, which is the two routes swapped. SR-26 is Riverdale Road, and it is not in Davis County at all: querying every SR-26 segment in the state roads layer returns municipalities of Riverdale, Ogden, South Ogden and Roy, every one of them in Weber County. Its southern end is up in Roy, one city north of here.
So the city contradicts itself, its adopted plan is right and its website is wrong, and the wrong version is the one that has spread. This is not a pedantic distinction either. A route number is how you find the traffic counts, the functional classification, the maintenance responsibility and the project history for a road at the agency that owns it, and looking up SR-26 will hand you a road in another county. If a document about a Sunset property names a state route, check which one it means.
The seam, in numbers
125,000
vehicles a day on the interstate, 2017 count
23,000
to 25,000 a day on Main Street, same count
SR 126
the route the state data returns for Main Street
1960s
the decade the city says took the street's east side
The sentence
The city wrote the destruction of the east side of Main Street into its own adopted plan, and left it there.
Most towns describe a freeway arriving in careful, neutral language. Sunset does not. The community history section of the general plan its council adopted on 15 November 2022 puts the interstate in the same paragraph as the postwar building boom and says plainly what it cost, and the sentence has survived at least two revisions of the document.
The passage runs: "During the 1960's and 70's there was an onslaught of residential development, which was typical to the rest of Davis County. The 1960's also saw the development of the I-15 Corridor, which required the destruction of the east side of Main Street and substantially changed the character of Sunset City." That is a city government's own account of its own main street, in its own governing document, and it is a far stronger statement than any outside source has ever made about this town.
It also dates the event, which most retellings do not. The city says the 1960s, in the same breath as the residential boom, which makes freeway construction and suburbanisation one decade rather than two unconnected facts. No single construction year is printed on this page, because the city gives a decade rather than a year and no transportation department record narrows it. If you need the year, it is a records request at the transportation department rather than a search.
What the sentence means physically is measurable, and the measurement is the whole page. Main Street runs north to south through Sunset at about longitude 112.026 west, the full length of the city. The interstate runs at about 112.025 west northbound and about 112.0256 west southbound, over the same latitudes. The gap between the Main Street centreline and the near edge of the freeway is on the order of forty to eighty metres, which is a matter of yards. Those coordinates are from the state roads layer, checked in August 2026; the distance derived from them is approximate and is not presented as a survey.
So this is not a freeway that went around a town or through its fields. Stand on Main Street in Sunset facing east and the interstate is behind the buildings, not over open ground. That is why a street that has a west side has essentially no east side, and it is why the city's own word for what happened is destruction rather than realignment. Everything on the far side of that alignment, including the quarter of the city that is Air Force ground, is on the boundary page rather than this one.
| Road | Route | Vehicles a day | Posted | What it carries |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Interstate 15 | I-15 | 125,000 | 70 mph | A national corridor passing through a city of about 5,400 people, almost none of it stopping |
| Main Street | SR 126 | 23,000 to 25,000 | 40 mph | The city's arterial and, per the general plan, where its commercial land use is concentrated |
| 1800 North | SR 37 | 16,000 | 40 mph | The second state route, running west from Main Street toward Clinton and West Point |
| 800 North | City and county route | 7,200 | 40 mph | A collector in the plan's own classification, and the busiest of the numbered east to west streets |
| 2300 North | City route | 5,600 | 40 mph | A collector under Sunset City jurisdiction, per the plan |
| 1300 North | City route | 1,200 | 40 mph | The city hall street, and the quietest of the counted routes by a wide margin |
Every count above is the transportation department's annual average daily traffic figure as carried in the state roads layer, checked in August 2026, and every one of them has a count year of 2017. They are nine years old and they are the newest in that dataset, so treat them as the shape of the traffic rather than as this year's volume, and re-pull from the transportation department's own traffic statistics before quoting a number anywhere it matters.
The details
Getting there
From the city building at 200 West 1300 North, go east on 1300 North and Main Street is the first arterial you meet; turn either way and you have the whole city's commercial frontage. Coming off the interstate, exit 335 at 650 North is the city's own freeway access, and the ramps for it are attributed to Sunset in the state roads layer even though the city's south boundary runs through them, so the interchange straddles the Sunset and Clearfield line. Which entrance to the installation any given household uses is a separate question and it belongs to the county page.
Before you go
- Walk the west side. There is very little east side to walk, which is the point of the page and is more obvious on foot than from a car.
- The counts in the table are 2017 figures. If a traffic number matters to a decision, get a current one from the transportation department rather than from any page, this one included.
- Exit 335's ramps straddle the city line, so a satellite navigation instruction that says Clearfield and a street sign that says Sunset can both be right at the same moment.
- The city publishes no parking rules on its website. The codified ordinances are the primary source for anything with a fine attached.
The crossing
Two state routes meet inside one and a half square miles, and their junction is where the town started.
SR-126 runs north to south as Main Street. SR-37 runs east to west as 1800 North. In the state roads layer, SR-37 segments appear in Sunset, then Clinton, then West Point, and then continue across the county line into Hooper and West Haven in Weber County as 5000 West, 4000 South and 5900 West. The general plan confirms the pair without giving either number, saying only that Main Street and 1800 North are designated state routes. Two designated state routes crossing inside a city this size is genuinely unusual.
The junction is also the oldest address in town. The general plan puts the first settler family's home and farm at approximately 85 West 1800 North in the 1870s, says a city hall was built at that same address in 1965, and describes it as where the fire department stands. The city's park rentals page publishes Central Park there today. Four uses of one block, a couple of hundred yards west of where two state highways cross, and the parks page carries the sequence in full.
The plan's road hierarchy is worth reading alongside the counts, because it explains why the numbers fall the way they do. The freeway is Interstate 15. The arterial is Main Street. The collectors are 1800 North, 800 North, 1300 North, 2300 North and 250 West. Everything else is a residential access road, which the plan says should carry very low volumes and slow movements and should have many traffic calming features. It also names 1300 North and 2300 North as the east to west routes under Sunset City's own jurisdiction, which is a useful thing to know before asking who fixes a road.
One more line from the same section, and it is the city's own restraint rather than an omission: "Public transportation is provided by daily UTA bus routes. Route numbers are listed on the UTA website and do change periodically." A city government deliberately declining to print route numbers in a document with a ten year horizon is good practice, and this page follows its lead. No bus route number appears anywhere on this companion. Take it from the transit authority for the specific stop you would actually use.
A hundred and twenty five thousand vehicles a day pass through this city on one alignment and twenty five thousand on another, forty to eighty metres apart, and almost none of the first group stops.
The plan
A town that lost half a street to a freeway has written down that it wants to make a centre out of the rest.
The land use element of the adopted plan carries a run of action items about exactly this street, and read together they are a description of what the city thinks is missing. It wants to identify "Places" within Sunset City for focused development or specific regulations, "such as a Town Center and Main Street". It wants to develop a mixed use zoning overlay for the corridor to prioritise more intense development. And it wants to develop a land use plan for Main Street covering building standards and right of way and sidewalk standards "that are focused on engaging the street to create more activity".
The transportation element adds a walkability goal in the same direction, including an action item to "Improve the walkability of Main Street to attract more activity to businesses" through design standards and sidewalk improvements, and a separate action item to implement a road diet by identifying narrower roadway options. The economic development element carries its own goal to plan the 1800 North corridor for future development "in an effort to create a gathering place for citizens". Four elements of one plan, all pointing at the same two streets.
Now the part that has to be said plainly. Every one of those is an action item in a document, with no date, no budget, no funding source and no ordinance attached. There is no town centre in Sunset. There is no mixed use overlay. There is no adopted Main Street land use plan, no road diet and no 1800 North gathering place. No page, listing or agent may describe any of them as existing, funded, scheduled or likely, and a buyer told that a Sunset main street revitalisation is coming should ask to see the ordinance and the appropriation rather than the plan.
What the action items are genuinely useful for is understanding the live civic question on this street, which is a real one. A city whose arterial lost its east side to an interstate in the 1960s, and whose general plan puts 94.5 per cent of its land in residential use with commercial concentrated on that one street, has written down that it would like the remaining half to become a centre. Whether that ever happens is a matter for council agendas, and the city publishes those.
None of the Main Street proposals in the general plan is dated, funded or adopted as an ordinance, and none of them has been built. The town centre, the mixed use overlay, the Main Street land use plan, the walkability programme, the road diet and the 1800 North gathering place are all action items in a plan revised on 15 November 2022. An action item is a statement of intent by a planning commission, not a project. Anyone repeating them should say which document they come from and that they carry no date, and anyone told that a street is about to change should ask for the ordinance number and the funding. The place to check is the council agendas and minutes the city publishes, and the codified ordinances at American Legal Publishing, both read for a current position rather than a stated ambition.
Living with it
A national freeway forty metres behind a city arterial, and what that is actually like at an address.
The honest framing for a buyer is that Sunset is a narrow city with a very loud line down the middle of it, and how much that matters depends almost entirely on how many streets west of Main you are. The city is only about three quarters of a mile wide on its residential side, so there is no address here that is far from the corridor, but there is a real difference between a house on 250 West and a house a block off Main. Nothing on this page can tell you which side of that line a specific street falls on, and one evening standing on the sidewalk will.
The second thing worth doing is the count in the table, in person and at the hour you would actually be there. A hundred and twenty five thousand vehicles a day is an interstate volume, and it does not stop at night in the way a city street does. Twenty three to twenty five thousand on Main Street is a genuine arterial volume with a 40 mph posted limit and commercial frontage on one side. Those two numbers describe two different kinds of noise and two different kinds of crossing problem, and both of them are worth ten minutes of your own attention before an offer.
The third is access, which is the compensation. Exit 335 puts a Sunset address on the interstate in under a minute from most of the city, SR-126 runs the whole length of it, SR-37 runs west from 1800 North, and the city's own plan notes that commuter rail stations sit in Roy in Weber County and in Clearfield in Davis County. There is no station in Sunset and the line runs along the western city limit without stopping. For most households here the practical door is the interchange, and it is close.
Money is the one thing this page leaves alone on purpose. What a block on or near Main Street sells for, what its levy comes to and what is listed on it this month all sit on the practical city guide, which is where anything with a dollar sign in front of it belongs. The narrower question here is why the street looks the way it does, and what a corridor built behind it in the 1960s left standing.
The far side
The city limits and the base
About a quarter of the city sits east of the interstate, inside a closed installation, on the city's own map.
Read the guideThe other line
How Sunset got its name
A railroad on the west side that a community drew a boundary along, and a name chosen in about 1916.
Read the guideOff the street
The three parks
Three addresses, three published bowery capacities, and one of them a block from the state route junction.
Read the guideMoving here
Moving to Sunset
The full service list for a city that keeps its police force and buys nearly everything else in.
The mover pageThe practical side
The Sunset city guide
Where the figures live: what sells on these streets, who sends the bills, what the drive runs to.
Open the guideThe wider county
Davis County on The Local
The other fourteen towns in this county, each with a companion, and seven subjects held in common.
The region hubKeep reading
The rest of Sunset on The Local.
The city line
The city limits and the base
About a quarter of this city is Air Force ground, inside the municipal line.
Read the guideThe name
How Sunset got its name
A bishop asked three women for a name in 1916. The railroad drew the line after.
Read the guideThe parks
The three parks
Three addresses, three boweries, and a whole day under the biggest one for $15.
Read the guideMoving here
Moving to Sunset
Its own police force, and a neighbor's ZIP code, fire engines and street numbers.
Read the guideThe companion
The whole of Sunset
A mile and a half of grid, a freeway down the seam, and a federal quarter nobody drives into.
Start at the hubQuick answers
Main Street, answered.
SR-126. The state's roads layer, which carries the transportation department's own route attributes, returns a highway name of SR 126 and a route name of 0126P for every Main Street segment inside the city, and the general plan the council adopted on 15 November 2022 names Main Street/SR 126 as its example of an arterial street. The SR-26 figure comes from one sentence on the city's own information page, which has the two routes swapped. Both were checked on 16 August 2026, and where a website and an adopted plan disagree, the plan wins.
In Weber County, and nowhere near Sunset. SR-26 is Riverdale Road. Querying every SR-26 segment in the state roads layer on 16 August 2026 returns municipalities of Riverdale, Ogden, South Ogden and Roy, all of them in Weber County, with its southern end up in Roy, one city north of Sunset. Nothing in Davis County carries the designation. The distinction matters because a route number is how you find counts, classification, maintenance responsibility and project history at the agency that owns a road, and the wrong one hands you a road in another county.
The city's own answer is unusually blunt. The community history section of its adopted general plan says the 1960s saw the development of the I-15 corridor, which required the destruction of the east side of Main Street and substantially changed the character of Sunset City. Measured from the state roads layer, the Main Street centreline and the near edge of the freeway sit roughly forty to eighty metres apart for the full length of the city. So the interstate did not go around the town or through its fields. It went down the back of the buildings on one side of its arterial.
The transportation department's annual average daily traffic figures in the state roads layer give 23,000 to 25,000 vehicles a day on Main Street with a posted 40 mph, against 125,000 a day on Interstate 15 at 70 mph a few dozen metres east of it. The other counted routes are 1800 North at 16,000, 800 North at 7,200, 2300 North at 5,600 and 1300 North at 1,200. Every one of those counts carries a year of 2017, so they are nine years old and they are the newest in that dataset. Re-pull a current figure before quoting one.
Yes, and it is rarely mentioned. 1800 North is SR-37. In the state roads layer its segments run through Sunset, Clinton and West Point and then cross the county line into Hooper and West Haven in Weber County as 5000 West, 4000 South and 5900 West. The general plan confirms the pair without printing either number, saying only that Main Street and 1800 North are designated state routes. Two designated state routes crossing inside a city of about 1.47 square miles is genuinely unusual, and their junction sits at the oldest address in town.
Exit 335 at 650 North. Its ramps are attributed to Sunset in the state roads layer, and the city's south boundary runs through them, so the interchange physically straddles the Sunset and Clearfield line. That is why a satellite navigation instruction naming Clearfield and a street sign naming Sunset can both be correct at the same moment. Which entrance to the installation east of the freeway a given household would use is a separate question, and it is answered on the county page rather than anywhere on this companion.
No. The general plan carries action items about identifying places for focused development such as a town centre and Main Street, developing a mixed use zoning overlay for the corridor, developing a land use plan for Main Street, improving the street's walkability and implementing a road diet, plus a separate goal to plan the 1800 North corridor as a gathering place. Every one of those is an action item in a document revised in November 2022 with no date, no budget and no ordinance attached. None of them has been built, and none should be described as existing or funded.
This page does not print one, and the reason is the city's own. Its general plan says public transportation is provided by daily transit authority bus routes, that route numbers are listed on the transit authority's website, and that they do change periodically. A city government declining to print route numbers in a document with a ten year horizon is good practice, and repeating a number from a third party summary is how a stale one spreads. Take the current route and stop from the transit authority for the specific address you are weighing.
No. The commuter rail line runs along the western city limit and does not stop in Sunset. The city's own general plan names the nearest stations as Roy, in Weber County, and Clearfield, in Davis County, and separately notes that the transit authority runs commuter rail north and south through Sunset adjacent to the existing railroad line between Sunset and Clinton. So the line is the city's boundary rather than an amenity inside it, and for most households here the practical door to the region is exit 335 rather than a platform.
A street with one side, and a city that says so in its own governing document.
Sunset is a narrow city with a very loud line down the middle of it, and the useful version for a buyer is short. Work out how many streets west of Main a specific address sits, because the residential city is only about three quarters of a mile wide and there is no address here far from the corridor. Stand on the sidewalk at the hour you would actually be home. Treat the traffic counts on this page as a shape rather than a current figure, and treat the town centre in the general plan as an intention rather than a project. Tell me which blocks you are weighing and I will introduce you to a Davis County partner agent who knows them.
Referral disclosure. Outside Southern Utah, I connect home sellers and buyers with partner agents I trust in their area. If you choose to work with an agent I refer, that agent's brokerage pays my brokerage (Real Broker, LLC) a referral fee. The fee comes out of the agent's compensation; it is not an added cost to you. You are always free to choose any agent you wish, and using a referred agent is never required.