You may have heard stories about Carmageddon. You may have even experienced it and lived to tell the tale of waiting in traffic for two hours as you tried to make your way home after one of the best snow days in 2014. Since that fateful date, Park City and Summit County leaders have made every attempt possible to make sure our transportation issues are solved and Carmageddon never happens again.

Or have they.

They’ve invested time and money into ideas, for sure. They’ve held meetings. They’ve invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into studies. They are building a transit center in Kimball Junction. Yet, it all focuses on the bus. Perhaps, you are going to ride the bus on your next trip to Vail, but I’m probably not.

I want to get from my house to PCMR as fast as I can, so I can ski. What are my options? Today I can take the bus and get there over an hour later (with no traffic) or to drive and get there in 20 minutes. Yet, when I drive, half the time the parking lot is full and I have to park at Fresh Market. Sound Familiar? Given the options, I (and most people) drive, even with the parking situation.

Enter Uber. Uber has been making inroads in the Park City market during the last year. Their focus has been around providing services during Sundance. Yet, I wonder if there is a bigger fish to fry. In a few select cities, Uber has launched UberPool. This is a carpooling service where riders can share an Uber ride with another person. It is about half the price of a normal Uber ride. That sounds great. I could see why people would use UberPool, but let’s take it a step further.

Imagine if Park City Municipal and Summit County worked with Uber to create UberSki. UberSki would be based on UberPool, using the traditional uber service, with Uber drivers, with four wheel drive vehicles and ski racks, that picked up people across Park City (maximum 4 riders) and transported them from their homes to resort and back.

If I, as a rider, had to spend an extra 10 minutes to pick up other skiers in my area, but was dropped off at the lift, and it cost $5 to $10, I would probably pay it (especially when our resorts start charging for parking). I would bet that I’m not alone.

If local governments worked with Vail and Deer Valley to subsidize this, it could even be more attractive.

The more I look at our transportation issues, I don’t see buses as a viable option unless massive structural changes are made to the way our community lives and operates. A solution like UberSki could take pressure off of some of our most contentious events and help alleviate some of the issues surrounding transportation.

I know that it sounds like another crazy idea from the Park Rag. That said, expanding on an idea that works (Uber) is usually a lot easier than expanding on an idea that doesn’t (buses).

I was talking with a Friend of the Park Rag and he said something quite profound: “If you want to solve our transportation problems, you have to have to create density.” What does that mean? It means that if we want to use typical transportation solutions (like buses and rail) to decrease traffic, people must live in locations tightly clustered together. Likewise, the places people go must also be tightly clustered together. Said another way, if most people live close to one of a handful of bus stops and they are also only headed to one of a handful of locations, then Park City buses can have more runs and decrease times to destinations.

When you think of it in those terms, it really focuses you on the issue. Buses and the Subway work in big cities like NYC because there are so many people clustered together in tight places. In the Park City area, you may have a couple of bus stops in Trailside area but because homes are not clustered together, the actual distance between most people’s homes and the bus stop makes using the bus unattractive. Likewise, because there are so many areas to service, the buses don’t come that frequently. Therefore, bus usage is low.

Now imagine that the Boyer Tech Park (that big open space on the west side of 224 near Hugo Coffee) was where all new residential development happened in the basin (impossible I know… but work with me here). You could have buses stop outside the development every 5 minutes. Further imagine that those buses went directly to where the people wanted them to go: a bus to Main Street, a bus to Canyons, a bus to SLC, a bus to Prospector, a bus to Quinn’s Junction. Now you have a solution. You’d wait 5 minutes, go to your destination, and get there nearly as fast as a car. Even my wife would ride the bus. It’s possible because there would be thousands of people living in a small area.

Yet, reality sets in. Most of the Park City population doesn’t live in a place like that. We are spread out. Our homes are not clustered and our destinations are not clustered. What a proper transportation system seems to need is ORDER and what we have is CHAOS. So, how do we achieve order out of chaos? Future development would need to be clustered together. You may have heard of this under another term, receiving areas.

“Receiving Areas” is a term used by planning personnel where development rights can be transferred from one location to another that achieves the holy grail … DENSITY. So, perhaps you are a land owner who owns 100 acres of land throughout the Basin and have the rights to build one home per 40 acres on that land. That would mean you could build 2 homes on that property (not very dense). Instead, Summit County could provide ways for you to trade that land for the right to build more homes in specific receiving areas (more dense). The reason Summit County would want to make that trade is to prevent urban sprawl (i.e. homes on every piece of land in the Basin). If the county can make that trade, all of a sudden they get density and limit the dreaded urban sprawl.

That all sounds great … until it comes into your backyard. If you are a Jeremy Ranch resident, you may not want 400 units of density built at the entrance to Jeremy Ranch. If you live on Old Ranch Road, 200 condos in your neighborhood may be a worse solution to you than 20 homes dotted throughout the Basin (even though those 20 homes would be classified as urban sprawl).

Therein lies the challenge. In order to introduce effective transportation solutions, like buses and rail, we need density. In order to achieve density, current neighborhoods will be impacted with more clusters of development. Adding large complexes of homes and condos to existing neighborhoods may not be viewed favorably. Yet, unless that happens, transportation efforts will likely be ineffective at solving our issues, because no one will use them.

It truly comes down to either accepting density or traffic. The question is, which is the lesser evil?

An interesting debate took place at Wednesday’s Summit County Council Meeting. The topic discussed was whether to help Basin Rec fund a tunnel or bridge across Highway 224 near Sun Peak. On one side you had Basin Rec, the County’s new Transportation Planning Director, and Council Chairperson Kim Carson. They seemed to show vocal support for a bridge or tunnel that would enable both trail users and elementary school students to cross Highway 224. Caroline Ferris, the aforementioned Transportation Director, perhaps summed it up best when she stated that connecting trails and making it easier for people to use various modes of transportation, other than a car, represents what we want our county to be.

On the other side of the argument, stood council members Claudia McMullin, Roger Armstrong, and Dave Ure. Ms McMullin’s main argument appeared to be that Basin Rec is responsible for recreation and this tunnel seems to be more about getting kids to school (and not recreation). Mr Ure and Mr Armstrong seemed to be arguing a bigger point… would people even use a tunnel and why not just try to tweak the status quo to make it easier to use the existing stop light and cross walk. Mr. Ure provided historical context. He said that when he was in the Utah state legislature, Summit County pushed him to build the walking bridge over I-80 between the Spring Creek area and Kimball Junction. He said he finally agreed to get it done at a cost of about $3 million. He said that today about 12 people use that bridge each month. He feared the same thing would happen in this case.

When Mr Ure made that statement, my brain clicked. It really seems that we need to have a debate about who we are as a community versus who we want to be. By looking at local government actions, “who we want to be” appears to be a community where most citizens want to ride the bus as much as possible. If we are not riding the bus, we want to use our trails as a method of transport, via bike, e-bike, and walking to get our children to school, to do our grocery shopping, to get to work, and to get to recreation. We also want to pack our new housing and commercial development into tight spaces near current areas where population is concentrated in order to prevent using up all of our open space.

I say that must be “who we want to be” because we are investing so much time, effort, and money into those solutions.

Yet, who we are seems to be someone different:

• We drive our kids to school. We wouldn’t generally consider having our kids walking or riding their bikes to school between November and April.
• We don’t ride the bus. It takes too long and most people would have to drive to a park and ride to wait for and eventually catch a bus.
• We drive our cars to work because we want (or need) the convenience of being able to come and go as we want, and the ability to do errands.
• We drive our cars to recreate because we want to maximize the time we are on the trails and slopes.
• We fight having commercial development in our backyards and don’t like the idea of packing homes (and condos) into our neighborhoods.

Granted, “who we are” is different for everyone. You may not agree with every item above but I would guess it rings true for a majority of the people in the Snyderville Basin.

The question is really whether our leaders’ vision of “who we want to be” is really WHO WE REALLY WANT TO BE … or is it just a utopian fantasy.

I don’t completely blame our government officials for coming up with ideas like bus transit centers and underground trail connections. It’s a great idea if people would actually use them. Just like Dave Ure’s walking bridge, it would have been a great way for people to get across I-80 safely. Unfortunately, if no one uses it, it’s just wasted time, money, and resources.

Of course, the counter argument is that if we don’t invest in enough infrastructure to support an idea, it will never work. For instance, if you don’t try and build a tunnel under 224 at Sun Peak, you’ll never know whether it would have been used by trail users and school children. If you don’t invest in good bus service, then you’ll never know whether people didn’t ride the bus because the service was bad or whether they just aren’t bus riders.

I believe we are at the point where we as a community need to decide who we really are. We need to decide whether we truly will ride buses. We need to decide whether we will bike to work. We need to decide whether our kids will walk to school. We as citizens truly need to answer the question that if our government builds these things, we will come.

But getting those answers can’t be found by using the methods we’ve pursued to date. We can’t start out with a solution in mind and try to push people towards it. We need to try and reach into the brains of people and understand their motivations. We need to ask questions that help people understand that we can spend money in a number of different ways. Money could be spent on trails. It could be spent on buses. It could be spent on transit stations. It could be spent on roundabouts. It could be spent on tweaks to the current systems. Or frankly it could be saved. Yet, we must communicate that if we spend it on a specific project, that money can’t be used elsewhere.

We need to further understand whether once that money is spent, will the person REALLY USE whatever has been provided — not whether they wish they were a person that would use it… but that they ARE the person that will use it.

There’s a great story about Portland and their rail system. Surveys found that a majority of people supported adding a rail system to reduce traffic congestion and gridlock. However, further studies delved deeper into the issue and found that most people supported rail because they thought it would rid the road of OTHER drivers, making the commute via car better for them. After 10 years, they had less than half the predicted rail ridership because the majority of people still drove their cars.

As we continue down this path, both our leaders and citizens need to work hard to distinguish hope from reality. It’s not a perfect science but we will all be better off if we can try to figure out if something is just a good idea or whether people will actually use it. We need to get a feel for whether the current vision of who we want to be is accurate. If so, we need to concentrate on finding a course that gets us from who we are now to that new state. If current ideas really don’t represent who we want to be, we need to take a hard look at reality and start charting some other courses.

Suppose you were Apple and had just released the newest iPhone. Let’s also suppose that the round button at the bottom worked about 99% of the time. You’d usually press it, and it would bring up Siri or the lock screen (as expected).

Yet, sometimes if you pressed it, it would do nothing at all. Or perhaps it would start blaring Taylor Swift (embarrassing if you’re 40 or 50 or 60 or maybe even 30). You’d want the button fixed, right? Of course. Is the whole phone completely worthless, and should Apple scrap the button concept and go back to the drawing board? No, of course not.

That’s somewhat how I feel about how we deal with traffic in the Park City area. 99% of the time it is fine. It’s that 1% of time, be it a huge snow, the arts festival, or a Friday night at 5PM in Kimball Junction that makes us take notice of traffic issues.

I was sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic a couple of weeks ago, trying to make my way to Whole Foods, when I finally noticed the problem. The left turn lane at Ute boulevard isn’t long enough. That causes cars that want to turn left toward Smiths to sit in the middle of traffic and block the cars that want to go straight through. Meanwhile, drivers notice this and try to get in the right lane to get out of the mess. This causes even slower through traffic.This ultimately leads to traffic backing up onto the on-ramp and down to I-80.

What if the left turn lane was tripled in size? A lot of that issue would be solved.

Now, I’m not naive to think that all of our traffic issues can be solved by minor tweaks to the system, but I do believe it is the low hanging fruit of solutions.

It seems like we often try to wait on GRAND solutions to our issues. We try to build transportation centers. We create circulating buses around Kimball Junction. We try to create marketing campaigns to change people’s behavior to encourage them to ride buses. Perhaps the simplest solution is looking at the point problems and solving them.

To be fair, perhaps our city and county leaders have done that and are waiting on UDOT (who manages many of the trouble-spots) to fix them. That said, I truly do wonder how much better the average issue would be if we looked at the specific problems and addressed them.

If Park City took the $100,000 it spent on busing workers from Kearns to Main Street (where I think almost no one road this bus) last fall and invested it instead in having skiers park at Richardson Flats and bused them in, would it have prevented Carmageddon? If Summit County, instead of investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in a transit station in Kimball Junction, worked with UDOT to redesign how some roads work, would we be better off? Perhaps (the verdict is still out on the upcoming transit station).

I know that the perfect solution is always more complex than it seems. Yet, I wonder if there are a number of point solutions that would get us a long way toward making our citizen’s transportation experiences better.