Park City Council endorses park-once transit mentality

The Summit Bike Share station at the Old Town Transit Center. Photo: TownLift

PARK CITY, Utah — A discussion on Park City’s long-range transportation plan on Thursday left the city council pushing for bolder ideas.

The framework of projects looks ahead 30 years and contains ideas such as aerial transit and several objectives including getting more people out of their cars.

“I think the piece that’s missing… is the vision up front for transportation,” councilman Ryan Dickey said.

“No visitor brings a car to Park City in 2030,” he said, shouting out one idea. “I think it’s incumbent on us to shape this into a vision that the community can respond to and rally around and that’s provocative.”

Councilwoman Tana Toly said she wants to see Main Street more targeted in the plans. “I don’t think it’s lost on anyone that Main Street is where we have the most pedestrians, and so I think we need to really figure out how people are — what are they doing once they do park their car one time?”

Councilman Max Doilney said the current plan is a good structure to build off of. “We can bounce those ideas around and figure out which one’s kind of rise to the top,” Doilney said.

He credited Dickey for previously bringing up the ‘park-once’ mentality, which he said could be a blanket tool for the city’s transportation department. “It helps staff come to us with — Hey, this fits into our park-once mentality. We have a connection to the airport that we want to endorse. Then we want to work with our regional partners so that people can park once in LA and go skiing in Park City.”

“The park-once, we can take that and say — Hey, this applies to this user group, whether it’s an employee or a visitor,” Park City Transporation Planning Manager Julia Collins told the council. “Park once in Salt Lake and take the express bus to the resort. That’s a plausible future in the five to 10 years that we could provide as a part of this vision.”

“I want to make sure that there’s a highlight on serving needs,” councilwoman Becca Gerber said. “People in our community that don’t have cars or people that are workforce.”

The discussion Thursday was part of a work session, and the plan will return to both the planning commission and city council.