Traffic is a head-scratcher for me. It’s the No. 1 complaint, or near to, in every conversation and survey about what’s wrong with Park City. But frankly, it’s not so, so bad if you’ve lived anywhere else.
Denver to the ski towns is the worst by far on weekend powder days, along with Saturday mornings up and Sunday afternoons down. Northstar and Palisades ski resorts from I-80 in Truckee can be right there. Try getting in or out of downtown Aspen at commuter time year-round.
Aside from between Snow Park and Marsac Avenue, and maybe U.S. 40 to PC Hill, it’s inconvenient and slow in Park City, but nothing like other ski towns.
Ten minutes between Richardson Flats and Prospector? Twenty to 30 minutes from Kimball Junction? This is annoying, for sure, during peak commutes.
A year ago the ski resorts took the blame for this travesty of inconvenience on the roads. This year, apparently the Park City mayor holds some kind of wand none has ever waved, though none has so much as a City Council vote, either, except to choose a city manager. Election season logic is always curious, all blacks or all whites teased out of a world gray in reality.
Another bit of fuzzy thinking, shared by many more folks who should know better than I’d expect, is the idea that workforce housing or any housing would add to commuter traffic if placed in the Park City core.
But logically, that can’t be. Workers who live in Bonanza Park, say, would already live at the destination — they wouldn’t be on the road in to where they already are. As such, EngineHouse will be viewed someday as a brilliant addition to Park City, much like the open space acquisition of the iconic McPolin Barn is now.
Same with housing on the 5-Acre Site, same with the rest of Bonanza Park, same with hotels on Swede Alley. Beds in the core means fewer cars on the road in. This isn’t complicated.
Why the clamor about housing? Well, only 12% of Park City residents work in Park City — hence, along with absurd home prices the critical need for affordable housing for workers, um, in the heart of Park City. This is a bigger, far more vexing and impactful issue than traffic, though the two are tied in interesting ways.
Such housing at Studio Crossing and a dozen acres of the Clark Ranch open space purchase on the road in from U.S. 40 will add to the main clog along S.R. 248, where some mornings two bumper-to-bumper lanes squeeze into one. That’s inevitable without swift, easy, comfortable and fun public transportation.
On the flip side, a real park on the 5-Acre Site is kind of a brilliant idea, if late brewing and following the Kimball Art Center’s painful loss of patience with the city.
The value of the open space moat around the city boundaries will only become more apparent as the region beyond fills in, and a genuine central park more often than not turns out to be a pearl for a city, large or small. Witness the little Library Field’s popularity. There’s a big clue.
Besides, it’s not a huge shift from an eight-year wasteland and electrical substation to planting grass and trees. Just a matter of some water, some seed, relocation of commercial structures that really, really don’t belong there in any case.
Clark Ranch’s 330 acres or so of remaining open space wouldn’t suffer for the affordable-housing subdivision Park City Heights having a neighbor tucked on the dozen or so acres between it and U.S. 40 with more affordable housing. Somehow, we have managed to build on the slope at the Heights, incidentally. Doing so isn’t exactly Mission Impossible. Hillsides aren’t all that formidable. We build on them everywhere, and have around here safely since, oh, the 1870s.
There’s enough need for housing to also build where appropriate in the flats. In and around what’s already going in at Studio Flats seems to make great sense that way. So do neighborhood necessities like, say, a grocery store.
The early success of Richardson Flat shows the pure potential of park ’n’ rides as staging areas on the journey to the ski resorts and Old Town itself. It seems that the City Council stumbled into a potential winner there, and maybe a key for the 2034 Olympics already looming large.
Gordo might be too close to town for a park ‘n’ ride, the toughest traffic hurdle overcome by the time cars crawl to that point. But Richardson Flat, farther out and next to U.S. 40, could be developed into something ideal for drive-ins.
Meantime, we forget traffic congestion today is pretty much a peak season commute phenomenon. Otherwise, you can drive these roads about as fast as the cops will let you. It’s predictable enough that the city government can announce a congestion schedule if you can’t figure out the obvious on your own.
In other words, if that’s your biggest complaint about Park City, things can’t be that terrible. The real problem isn’t driving here. It’s that so many want to live here. If anything, Park City is being loved to death, which translates to who can afford to buy a home, and sure, complain bitterly about the traffic.
Don Rogers is the editor and publisher of The Park Record. He can be reached at [email protected] or (970) 376-0745.