What We Don’t Understand About Park City Municipal’s View on Transportation

Last week, Park City’s transportation lead, Kent Cashel, met with the Park City School District’s Master Planning Committee. He gave a 15 minute talk on transportation. One of his key points was that if the school district decided to move Treasure Mountain off of Kearns it wouldn’t “solve” the transportation problem. He repeated this a few times.

Sitting in the meeting, the take-away was that no matter what the school district did, it wouldn’t impact traffic in Park City. Yet, with grade realignment likely coming our way, there will be 400 more students on Kearns if Treasure Mountain is rebuilt there. While we agree building a school somewhere else won’t SOLVE the traffic problem it would HELP the traffic problem. It’s like the person who is 100 pounds overweight who decides to forgo the first and second helping of dessert. Will that solve their weight issue? No. Will they lose 20 pounds over the next year. Probably.

What Kent Cashel did was give the School District an out. Traffic is likely less of no longer a consideration for the school district. However, if we were to look at problems across Park City what would be Problem #1? Traffic. What would be problem #23? Rebuilding Treasure Mountain.

We had a chance to help solve two issues at once. At a minimum there would be fewer cars on Kearns at certain times of the day. If Park City’s transportation guru had simply said, “moving the school would help… it won’t solve the problem… but it would help” then the district may have had an additional reason to look outside of Kearns for their school.

Instead, it appears Park City was more concerned with keeping a school in Park City. That’s at the expense of every resident and visitor that drives in on Highway 248.

Of course Park City’s solution is for the Utah Department of Transportation to widen the lanes on 248 in 2019. Or perhaps add a bus lane in the next couple of years. Anyone want to bet a steak dinner that their plan will SOLVE Park City’s transportation problems? If so, please let us know… we are hungry.

Either way, be sure to think of your Park City government when you are sitting in traffic heading into town. They not only own the problem, but the decisions they have made will likely make things worse.