Vail Resorts and Park City Mountain Resort are in the midst of delivering a miserable experience both to locals and visitors.

In the 43 days since the weekend before Christmas (Dec. 18), the PCMR parking lot has filled to capacity at least 25 times (nearly 60% of days), usually before the lifts even open. The Canyons Village base hasn’t fared much better, and even the weekend overflow in the high school has reached capacity on several weekends, sometimes leading to lines of visitors waiting for hours because transit buses are filled to capacity. As few as five years ago, it was unusual to have even a small handful of “filled to capacity” days at any of the resort bases.

The traffic absurdity is exacerbated because the logjams at PCMR and the Canyons base (and at Deer Valley) cause some drivers to slowly meander, hoping that an annoyed family decides to leave so that they can snap up the space. This causes a multiplication of the traffic logjam. My neighbors in Thaynes are effectively unable to travel anywhere during the morning or afternoon rush hour. Just two years ago, this was still a quiet neighborhood, even on busy days.

Vail Resorts still hasn’t opened two base access lifts (Silver Star and Sunrise), which typically take some pressure off the major base areas, nor have they opened several significant lifts on the resort (such as Short Cut — which is usually important to get people off the mountain, Sunpeak, Dreamscape or Thaynes). Their comments nearly a month ago — that these delays were due to weather conditions — now sound even hollower than they did back then. It is, in fact, quite clear that the issue stems from Vail Resorts not offering appropriate compensation and benefits to workers, who are instead choosing to work at places that are less avaricious.

The town transit system is simply not working reliably. I am lucky to live less than a minute walk from a bus stop, and a 3-minute walk from the Silver Star lift. Silver Star is not open, and despite using the app to track the bus, it usually doesn’t appear anywhere near its schedule. I recently used the bus to take my family to PCMR (holiday weekend, and I didn’t want to put more pressure on parking) — I checked the app, and saw a bus was scheduled to arrive in 5 minutes — just in time to get us to PCMR base for first lift. That bus disappeared from the app as we arrived at the stop, then the following bus didn’t arrive, and then the — full to the brim — bus finally arrived more than an hour later. People on it were complaining that their children had now missed their ski school classes. The traffic jam was such that the bus driver opened the doors so that we could walk out and hike up to First Time lift. We then waited another 30 minutes in the queue at First Time to even get to the proper base area. Again, another long lift line to even get onto Crescent or Payday. We ended up leaving after just two runs. We live 3 minutes walk from Silver Star lift, yet we walked out the door at 8:45 a.m., and returned just after noon having skied just two crappy runs in more than 3 1/4 hours.

This is utterly unsustainable, and is a horrible mark on our town. Park City needs to take the lead to fix this for the sake of locals and visitors, as Vail Resorts clearly has no intention to do so.

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