President Biden’s secretary of transportation, Pete Buttigieg, appeared in Salt Lake City on Friday, spending part of his time in the state talking to local-level government officials like Chris Robinson, who is the chair of the Summit County Council.
We hope the trip by Buttigieg was a productive one given the importance of transportation to a state that is growing so quickly it already seems to be stressing the infrastructure.
But we also want to extend the secretary an invitation to come back to Utah. The return trip should be to Park City and be at, say, 3:45 p.m. on a weekend, in the middle of ski season, during a snowstorm. Streets like Deer Valley Drive, Empire Avenue and the two state-highway entry corridors would be the best stops for him.
Buttigieg and his entourage would likely see the mess that is Park City traffic in the winter – lines of cars crawling out of the parking lots at Park City Mountain Resort and Deer Valley Resort as the drivers leave after a day on the slopes.
It is impossible for a county councilor like Robinson to describe the traffic issues in the Park City area during a brief, one-off visit by a Cabinet secretary. And how would someone at that high level of government even respond, since the Department of Transportation’s duties reach across the nation, meaning the issues in the Park City area must be weighed against those anywhere else in the U.S. when funding decisions are made in the nation’s capital?
Buttigieg, though, hopefully left Utah with a sense of the challenges in the state even after more than two decades of heavy investment in transportation infrastructure in an attempt to keep pace with the growth.
The challenges will continue, and likely intensify, with the expectation of continued population growth in Utah. That is why a visit like the one on Friday, by a Democratic president’s secretary of transportation to a heavily Republican state, is significant.
The Park City area is among the places in the state that envisions making a heavy investment in transportation infrastructure in coming years, even if the details have not been finalized. Buttigieg’s visit to the state on Friday was not designed to deliver tens of millions of dollars in transportation funding to the Park City area, but the community should hope progress was made toward the eventual goal of local infrastructure improvements.
If not, there is an open-ended invitation for him to visit Park City during the ski season.