I wrote about this a little last Thursday on the Utah thread in the "Resorts..." area and had a lengthy commentary on Twitter about it. What follows is a slightly more fleshed-out retelling of said thread.
Suffice it to say, there's an elephant in the corner of the room that nobody wants to discuss in Park City or within the offices in Broomfield: assuming that the primacy of the private car is permanent. And it simply can't be. Electric vehicles won't solve much, as tire and brake dust produce more PM2.5 and PM10 pollution than ICE exhaust in modern engines. The air quality in northern Utah is terrible and only getting worse with the rapid increase in population and the related increase in private motor vehicle traffic.
Yet there it was: the whole "but parking..." angle ended up deep-sixing the lift project. And sadly the Park City Planning Commission was unwilling to separate the Silverlode and Eagle/Eaglet project into two.
There's a lot that the town, the county, VR, and Alterra (yes, they need to be involved here) can do to make things better. The greater Park City region has a great public transit system (with an all-electric bus fleet that has awesome charging infrastructure), and UTA services the Kimball Junction transit hub with buses from SLC (and more riders would mean more frequent bus service). If more people used transit it would help quite a bit for all, whether resident or visitor.
Something I proposed on Twitter: have VR and Alterra invest in large parking facilities in both Summit County (Kimball Junction or Silver Creek Junction) and in Salt Lake City (buy out the silly Walmart at the mouth of Parley's Canyon, adjacent to the Ski Utah offices and build there) and offer bus service from these lots. Make the parking at these lots free (SLC lot) or with incentivized pricing for carpooling (Summit County lots). Have the Epic and Ikon Pass products include free UTA access (as is the case with Ikon and the Cottonwood Canyon resorts).
And what little public parking remains should be either:
a. ADA compliant for those who need such access; or
b. prohibitively expensive to encourage use of the parking lots.
Park City is a place that is very walkable, year round. The free buses connect every park of Park City and Snyderville with regular and frequent service. The solution is right there but people are conditioned to being able to drive everywhere with impunity and nobody seems to be doing anything about it at any meaningful level (see: the Utah Inland Port boondoggle and the widening of I-80 in SLC).
At any rate, color me disappointed that nobody in the Park City Municipal Building, nor in the corporate offices of Vail Resorts or Alterra, is thinking of how to be stewards of the future. Sure, this is a bit of a standoff between Goliath characters but neither of them want to face the fact that they can help slow the proliferation of pollutants that are acting to shorten the ski season and make the air toxic.
Just my $0.09 (adjusted for inflation), your mileage may vary. As a SLC native I weep for my home state.