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Utah Park City Mountain Lift Upgrades Blocked

Tricia

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See the Ski Area Management article


From article:
On Twitter, PCM further contested the planning commission’s capacity concerns, writing: “Chairlift tourism, or the idea that modernizing lifts will draw more crowds, does not exist. Skiers and riders just want to spend more time on our vast terrain and less time in line.”
 

Wasatchman

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I find this article provides more context in the rationale for the decision.

 

fatbob

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Weird that local towns are going into bat against VR on things that might marginally improve the ski experience for all.

Where are VR going to magic up vast parking lots from for instance if that's the real condition? Make everything perfect is a tough planning condition in towns that have been happy to let real estate development run unfettered as long as the $ flowed.
 

Brian Finch

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Thinking that may be a starting point for the leverage that they may have.

VR has decimated the experiences at Stowe, Lundow & Dover in the East & why would a local board support any initiative now?
 

fatbob

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Personally I feel that resort towns have themselves probably been complicit in the sort of growth that leads to the problems VR has today and the better strategy would have been a far more proactive interventionalist policy on areas like employee housing and parking/ traffic. How to retrofit such measures is a major challenge and blocking VR while demanding more feels like it's just going to push VR to say "sod it, no more investment for you, we'll just bleed this as a cash cow, you deal with collateral damage".
 

HardDaysNight

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Part of the issue is that Vail Resorts can’t be trusted to tell the truth having been caught out in multiple lies and duplicitous spinning since taking over PCMR. So when they claim that their CCC is x and that their proposed changes won’t result in that being exceeded, no one believes them. When they claim that their paid parking scheme will mitigate the disaster of last year and that their proposal won’t aggravate the problem, no one believes them. And they shouldn’t because Vail Resorts are habitual liars. Just like when Mike Goar appeared at a council meeting to claim that there were no more people at the resort than in previous years and then had published under his name in the Park Record a piece written by Vail’s PR department making the same claim. Now we find, from cell phone records and Vail’s own numbers, that the 21/22 season had record numbers, at least 15% more than 20/21 which was itself a record!

There are many things that could be done that would improve the skier experience far more than the proposed lift upgrades and Vail should focus on those.
 

Philpug

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If anyone has been to PCMR in the past few years knows that the resort is in the need for some replacement lifts, these lifts are pretty tired. With that said, Vail has not earned one inch of leeway in anything they ask for and the community is holding their feet to the fire. This will be a no win fight and the loser will be the PCMR skier.
 

snwbrdr

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Sounds like the locals are yelling: "Get off my lawn"

since a smoother operating mountain will bring more "outsiders" to the area, ruining their living experience.

Let's hope the residents against, don't have EPIC passes. If they do, and they know who, I hope Park City will cause their passes not to work at Park City, forcing them to go to another EPIC resort
 
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Tricia

Tricia

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More on this from Dave Amirault's feed:
The comments are quite interesting.
 

fatbob

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One applauds the idea of Park City locals not buying Epic passes. Exactly the sort of self sacrifice needed to ensure their visitors have a better time ;). Perhaps they might also keep their vehicles off the street at ski travel times or consider a winter vacation away ;)
 

Rudi Riet

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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.
 
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fatbob

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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).
It's a solution for lots of places but has to be combined with aggressive enforcement on those that think they can drive or just drop off regardless. Where there's still a desire to make $ on premium parking or allow drop offs etc then roads get clogged regardless (see Northstar for a case study in how to fail at remote parking) Little cottonwood could be a delight if the ONLY vehicles allowed were a continuous service of EV buses (yeah we know you've got a reservation at GMD, drive up only after 6pm)
 

Rudi Riet

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It's a solution for lots of places but has to be combined with aggressive enforcement on those that think they can drive or just drop off regardless. Where there's still a desire to make $ on premium parking or allow drop offs etc then roads get clogged regardless (see Northstar for a case study in how to fail at remote parking) Little cottonwood could be a delight if the ONLY vehicles allowed were a continuous service of EV buses (yeah we know you've got a reservation at GMD, drive up only after 6pm)

The town, county, and VR/Alterra can (and should) have pick up/drop off (PUDO) zones, for sure. And yes, there needs to be enforcement of all these things. A traffic enforcement division of the Park City Police Department and the Summit County Sheriff's Department would be a good start. So would automated enforcement - something that Utahns have railed against in the past but work well in practice. And Utah should look into RFID tolling systems in all three major canyons (Parley's and both Cottonwoods) if funding is an issue.

Vail has done remote parking well at Breckenridge per my experience. It's been done in concert with the town and county and while not perfect it makes the town easier to navigate. Sure, there are examples of them not doing things well (e.g. Northstar) but each locale will have different infrastructure concerns and realities.
 

fatbob

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Yep - think the Airport lot at Breck works really well (together with a sensible amount of parking at the Gondola). Dead easy if you're driving into town and easy stops at the bakery and distillery for refreshment on departure. In fact Summit County CO as a whole is good transit. The first 2 times I visited didn't even have a car at all and it was back in the day when VR or a contractor actually ran a daytrip bus over to Vail so value add there.
 

Wilhelmson

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Seems like the board just wanted to block this outright, otherwise they would have allowed VR to modify the application to only one lift upgrade. Maybe they felt that VR and the planning department had not engaged the board early enough in the process. Maybe VR tried to push it through without enough input from the city. These types of preordained agreements tend to put board members off and they will just kill it if they had already suggested reasonable conditions to the permit. Usually the applicant will see the writing on the wall and change their tune. Who knows.
 

Rudi Riet

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I'm guessing the PCPB decided that a circa 1998 long-range development plan by the previous resort owner didn't exactly hold muster in the days of Vail Resorts' ownership. I understand that reasoning completely as a lot of things have changed in terms of mountain use and development, population growth, and overall environmental strain.

Also: Park City is a fairly tony community, and while they rely on tourism money to pad the town coffers they also aren't fond of the glut of people (both tourists and new residents) descending on their "little slice of paradise." So any political muscle the Parkites can exert on the new corporate overlords will happen.

I still think the whole thing is ignoring the climate and environmental realities and not addressing the decidedly last century approach to transportation, and that's sad. Let's see how it plays out. If anything, this eye punch to VR is a necessary wake-up call for all involved.
 

HardDaysNight

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During the 2002 Olympics, unless one had a resident’s permit, all vehicles incoming to Park City were parked in lots either at the I80 or 40 entrances and the occupants bussed in. Busses ran very frequently and reliably. This arrangement should be made permanent year round.
 

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