Park City Transit Route Operations Coordinator Larry Brisk sits behind an array of displays at the Park City Traffic Control Center. The screens show the real-time locations of all Park City Transit buses, route times, and live UDOT traffic cameras on Park City’s major roads and intersections.
His job is to monitor traffic and adjust how the buses navigate through town in the event of an accident or other bottleneck.
In between calls to bus drivers, he says traffic has always been a challenge in Park City with State Routes 224 and 248 the only ways in or out during the winter.
“It’s just what it is, it’s the nature of the beast in town here," he says. "We have two ways in and out and everyone has to use them if they don’t live here in town. It’s one of those beasts that probably isn't going away anytime soon, but we do the best we can with it to keep it flowing.”
The traffic center was built in a repurposed office space at the Park City Police Department on Snow Creek Drive in 2019 and boasts a suite of high-tech tools the city uses to monitor traffic as it happens. It also allows city staff to collect and analyze data to better handle traffic situations in the future.
Traffic in Park City has been at the top of a lot of people’s minds – particularly this winter. The city council heard almost two hours of public comments in January that largely focused on the amount of traffic around the base of Park City Mountain Resort.
After the meeting, the city and resort announced a series of traffic changes to help with the gridlock that included a new traffic pattern around the base area.
The stoplights in Park City are part of a complex UDOT network that uses AI and data collected from radar sensors. The sensors count the number of cars at an intersection and can tell how fast they are moving through it up to 900 feet away. The data is then fed into the system and a stoplight pattern is developed for the intersection.
Traffic Engineer Scott Stevenson says he does have the ability to manually switch the stoplights and does make the occasional change during a peak traffic period, but he also needs to consider how giving more green lights to an intersection will impact traffic elsewhere before making a change.
“As soon as we give somebody else more green time, somebody else has to wait," says Stevenson. "If we’re putting a lot of traffic on 224, all of your side streets and left turns have to wait for that traffic to clear out before they can go. As you get closer to congested intersections like out at Ute (Boulevard) and Olympic (Parkway) in Kimball Junction, there’s a lot of competing traffic out there, so we can’t make everybody just wait four or five minutes just to let the green band of everybody leaving town go through. We’ve gotta find some level of optimal green leaving the city, but without queuing and destroying the way the side streets are functioning as well.”
Stevenson says during the day, the stoplights typically run on two to three minute intervals, depending on how much traffic there is in town. He says the ultimate goal is to have cars stopped as little as possible – slow going is better than not moving at all.
Franklin Williams manages the traffic center and says internal city discussions on more resources going toward traffic management are always happening and heavily influenced by feedback from the public.
“We are currently doing a lot of evaluation of data that we’re getting from the signals and roadways," Williams says. "We have our long-term transportation plan that’s being currently worked through and those will inform a lot of those budget decisions on where we decide to make changes, either to the roadway or infrastructure to help keep things moving. Yes, I would say that there are numerous discussions both currently happening and planned to determine where we need to spend money to help improve our travel situations in town.”
Williams says anyone with traffic feedback they’d like to give the city is encouraged to fill out a feedback form on the city’s website, or contact a member of staff directly.
In the meantime, he encourages people to carpool or ride the bus if they need to get around town.
