Developers with projects in the Snyderville Basin may soon be required to submit a traffic impact study if the proposal is expected to generate more than 25 trips during peak hours.
The code amendment, which the Snyderville Basin Planning Commission forwarded to the Summit County Council with a unanimous recommendation, would mandate that developers provide a traffic impact study if the project will generate enough “trip ends” during peak hours.
Peak hours are typically from 7 to 9 a.m. and 4 to 6 p.m., but planning commissioners requested a change to 7 to 10 a.m. and 3 to 6 p.m. They cited ski traffic and the county’s large commuter population as reasons to expand the window.
The county uses the trip end metric to determine the impact of a project and how much a developer will need to pay in impact fees. Trip ends refer to a driver’s final destination, not any ancillary stops. For example, if a driver leaves their home, stops at a gas station and then goes to a retail store, the trip end is the retail store, not the gas station.
Developers with large projects in the Basin typically submit a traffic impact study, but county planner Ray Milliner said those submissions have been a courtesy, not a requirement.
“Currently, there’s nothing in our code that requires them to do a traffic study, so if a developer were to say, ‘I just don’t want to do it,’ we don’t have any teeth in our code to make them do it,” he said. “Generally, they just do it because they feel like, ‘Well, it’s probably in our best interest,’ but what we’d like to do is say, ‘OK, this is required at this level, and it’s in the code, and you have to do it,’ and off we go.”
Summit County Transportation Planning Deputy Director Eva de Laurentiis said the proposed code amendment would require developers to hire a third-party engineering consultant and prepare a traffic impact study if the project is estimated to generate 25 or more trip ends during peak hours. The developer would be responsible for funding the study in addition to hiring an engineer.
“Our goal with this is then to put a form on the website that outlines what is expected out of an impact study and creates clear guidelines for that so that we have some uniformity in the studies,” de Laurentiis said.
If a traffic impact study determines the development needs mitigation because of the amount of traffic, the developer would be responsible for funding and constructing that infrastructure, such as installing a new traffic light or building a roundabout.
De Laurentiis said 25 trips may sound small, but it’s a standard in the transportation industry and the same benchmark Park City Municipal uses. She added that the county didn’t want to mandate a study for fewer than 25 trips to help local businesses, as traffic impact studies often cost between $20,000 and $40,000 to conduct.
“We’re not going to require that small businesses or even mid-sized businesses or retailers do these (traffic impact studies) for the most part unless they’re going to a large space,” de Laurentiis said. “It’s really for the larger developments that are going to have an immediate transportation infrastructure impact to our community. … We don’t want to be a barrier to entry for them to expand their businesses.”
Developers would also need to include information on traffic changes throughout each phase of a project to give county officials an idea of how infrastructure will be affected as construction progresses.
The Planning Commission immediately expressed support for the change, with Planning Commissioner Tyann Mooney saying the board has “been begging for this for a while.”
The County Council will have the final say in whether the code amendment passes, but a vote has not yet been scheduled as of Thursday afternoon.