A new road here. A new tunnel there. Maybe even a wildly repositioned street as well.
City Hall has started discussing what could be dramatic alterations to Park City’s road network in anticipation of the expected traffic in the coming years and decades. The exercise involves considering reworking some of the busiest roads in Park City as well as some neighborhood roads.
Leaders caution that the ideas have not been agreed upon, and it would likely be years before work could start on any of the most ambitious changes.
Matt Cassel, the Park City engineer and the City Hall staffer who is leading the efforts, instead said officials want ideas studied that could later be put in place. He said there is not funding set aside for projects based on the ideas, some of which climb into the tens of millions of dollars, and a timeline for work has not been crafted. A list of priorities has not been created.
“The goal isn’t necessarily to change the road network we have right now,” the city engineer said.
But there is expected to be growth discussions in the coming months that will likely address the road network, with projects like the redevelopment of the Bonanza Park district. Traffic is typically a key issue in development-related discussions.
Cassel expects discussions with the Park City Planning Commission as well as with Mayor Dana Williams and the Park City Council later.
City Hall held a spring open house in the lobby of the Eccles Center, unveiling a lengthy list of road ideas to a crowd of approximately 30 people. The people came from differing Park City neighborhoods and spent time studying boards describing the ideas.
The people at the open house mulled over ideas for their individual neighborhoods as well as the broader concepts for the roads.
Barry Jenkins, who lives on Fox Glen Circle, a small street in Solamere, wondered whether some of the concepts would lead drivers into neighborhoods instead of keeping them on traditional corridors. He said some of the ideas “really are problematic.”
One of the ideas, a road connection linking the Solamere and Prospector neighborhoods, was of note to Jenkins. He said such a link would attract drivers looking for a shorter route between Kearns Boulevard and Deer Valley.
“You’re inducing cut-through traffic into established neighborhoods. That’s a great way to destroy the neighborhood,” Jenkins said.
Another person who attended the open house, Tim Fehr, was intrigued with an idea of connecting Kearns Boulevard and Meadows Drive through a new road on the edge of PC Hill and the Park City School District campus. Such a road would bypass the traffic on the congested section of Kearns Boulevard in Prospector.
“It would make it more convenient when I want to go to Heber, Jordanelle, the Rock Cliff Nature Center . . . Even Home Depot,” Fehr, who lives on Eagle Cove Drive in Park Meadows, said.
Handling traffic has challenged Park City leaders throughout much of the skiing era, but the backups, Parkites say, became especially bad in the years between the 2002 Winter Olympics and the onset of the recession. Commuter traffic has clogged the S.R. 248 entryway onto Kearns Boulevard, Old Town is oftentimes congested and Park Avenue is busy at numerous points during the day, leading to the traffic headaches among Parkites and commuters.
A consultant assisting City Hall, Matt Riffkin, acknowledged the concepts might eventually be kept as backup plans. Park City leaders might instead opt to widen transit systems, encourage more carpooling and improve pedestrian routes, Riffkin, who is with a firm called InterPlan, said.
The city engineer expects there will be opposition to some of the concepts as they receive wider publicity.
“All ideas will be resisted by those they will immediately impact,” Cassel said.