On March 22, 2025, a 16 year old driving westbound on Fort Union Boulevard swerved to avoid hitting a car pulling up in front of him. The quick maneuver and wet streets caused the teenager to lose control, and he crashed into a semitruck parked on the side of the road. The teenager died on the scene.

The tragic death of Elijah Exodus Bustamante-Martínez sparked a desire among Midvale residents to impose restrictions on semitrucks parking on busy roads. And the city council passed an ordinance on Dec. 2 barring all commercial vehicles from parking on the street. 

“I had a few people reach out to me on this, which I don't necessarily get, and everyone was like ‘make it as restrictive as possible,’” Midvale Councilmember Bryant Brown said moments before the unanimous vote.

The ordinance came about after numerous council discussions over a six-month period, and making it apply to all for-profit vehicles, not just semitrucks, was spurred by the car-sharing app Turo.

“This whole conversation started with … there’s a safety issue with having huge semitrucks and large commercial vehicles on our roads, then it became like ‘oh yeah and there is also this Turo thing that we just discovered,’” Mayor Dustin Gettel said. “... I think encompassing it all together is great because now … it takes care of the core problems that we were experiencing and that’s safety in neighborhoods.”

Individuals using public streets as “essentially their storage space” for their Turo cars have become a growing nuisance to residents, Midvale’s Deputy City Attorney Daniel Van Beuge said at a council discussion in November.

“On one particular street, an officer, as going out to a call, has counted up to 12 of their [Turo] vehicles on a singular section of Midvale public street,” Beuge said, “which has been frustrating to the residents in the area because their parking or public parking is being occupied by all these Turo vehicles taking up space from them.”

Parking on roadways for commercial purposes is still allowed for tasks like dropping people off or loading or unloading a vehicle, as long as the driver leaves once their task is complete. But someone parking for extended periods of time will get an infraction on their first violation of the new ordinance and a class C misdemeanor on any subsequent offense.

Some councilmembers raised concerns about the new restrictions affecting residents who use their personal cars for ridesharing apps like Lyft or Uber to make some extra income. However, Gettel noted that most parking enforcement does not come from police patrolling around looking for rideshare cars, but rather from residents who spot the vehicles and call them in.

“It’s going to be rare, if ever, someone calls to our attention a single Lyft vehicle that’s parked there overnight until they go onto their next shift, but it is very easy for someone to notice … 12 cars parked on Bingham Junction Boulevard between Bingham Junction Station and 7800 South,” Gettel said.

Along with parking on Midvale streets, the ordinance added the same punishments to commercial vehicles parked in city-owned parking lots, with some exceptions. Beuge told the council in November that the code change was prompted by some businesses on Main Street using city-owned lots to store their delivery vehicles.

“I think frankly that this is fair because we tell … for example, the old fire station … ‘hey, you cannot use this as a parking lot to run your business,’” Brown said. “The city’s not here to make your balance sheet a little bit better.”