After attending the Planning Commission meeting on Aug. 12, I ask the Park City Council and the Planning Commission to consider the following input and recommendations as they think through the plans for the 5 acres, and especially for Bonanza Drive.
There are two related pending issues regarding the 5-acre plan:
- The 5-acre plan itself and what should that land be used for.
- Traffic flow on Bonanza Drive, regardless of what the 5 acres is used for.
The traffic flow on Bonanza drive is a pending issue because it is clearly one of the worst traffic bottlenecks in Park City regardless of what the 5 acres will be used for.
The 5 acres are vacant now. Whatever it will be used for in the future will only add to car traffic on Bonanza Drive.
A park will have visitors who will drive a car or take a bus to the park. The current residential-commercial proposal has about 280 underground parking spaces for cars. Logic tells me that those cars won’t be always parked in the garage. Rather, the residents and retail customers will be in and out of the underground garage multiple times per day, which adds to traffic on surrounding streets, including Bonanza Drive.
So with car traffic increasing on an already bottlenecked Bonanza Drive, any 5-acre plan must include enough right of way to reconfigure Bonanza Drive into two car lanes in each direction, a center turn lane, bus stops and perhaps dedicated bus lanes as well. This would greatly help solve the traffic bottleneck issue.
Approving any 5-acre plan that does not include such reconfiguration of Bonanza Drive would perpetuate and make worse what is already the worst traffic bottleneck in Park City, and would make the cost of reconfiguring Bonanza Drive at a later date very costly and perhaps prohibitively costly.
So during the process of approving any 5-acre plan, do not pass up this opportunity to provide enough right of way to reconfigure Bonanza Drive. Better yet, there is no need to wait for the finalization of any 5-acre plan. Start the Bonanza Drive reconfiguration now to fix the current and future traffic flow.
And that’s the bottom line.
Jim Offerdahl
Park Meadows