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What Local Ski Resort is Charging For Parking?
When Vail came to town, concerned citizens worried that charges for parking would soon follow. So far that fear hasn’t come to fruition. But there is another ski resort that seems to be inching its way in that direction . If they pull it off, it’s likely other resorts will follow.
Who do we have to thank for this? Snowbird.
I was planning my annual pilgrimage to Snowbird’s Oktoberfest and I wondered what time the event started. To my surprise, I saw the following at the bottom of the page:
Then I began wondering if it was a trend. So, I checked out their page on a previous event, Brewfest. Yep, “$5 parking (cash only)” was listed in the pricing. What could the reason be?
The positive way to look at it is they are trying to incent people to take a bus up the canyon to help reduce traffic and make the ride safer. Yet, $5 probably won’t do that, especially if the car has multiple people. The more cynical way to look at it is a revenue grab. It appears Snowbird has about 2800 parking spots. If all those were filled up at Oktoberfest each day, that would be a clean $14,000 every day. Not bad gravy on top of an already successful event.
The real question for Snowbird is whether they will carry this over to the ski season. I’d guess that if they receive few complaints this fall, it very likely could be. Then the question becomes how long until paid parking is adopted by PCMR and Canyons. If Snowbird does go forward with it this season, and doesn’t get much bad press, I’d look for changes here within a year.
Thanks Snowbird.
Parkrag
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Comments
2 Comments
Charging for parking at the CC resorts will create the incentive for more car pooling and bus use in those canyons. Resulting in less vehicle trips in the CCs. That is one of the desired outcomes of the Mountain Accord, and is critical for the preservation and environmental protection of the Wasatch Mountains. As the MA moves forward, you can expect to see Vail and DV implement paid parking as well. Less vehicles means less traffic congestion and less air and noise pollution.
I can see that line of thinking. At $5 I’m not sure it does much to disincent people from driving. That number likely needs to be in the $20 range to stop people from driving. Obviously if you have a pass to Snowbird and ski/board 30 times a year, you wouldn’t pay an extra $600. So that means some sort of parking pass that just gets factored into (can be added on) to the pass like PCMR used to do. And if a pass wasn’t offered, I wonder if the choice wouldn’t be car versus bus but instead skiing versus not. It just gets complicated.
It should be interesting to see how it all plays out.
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