The Sundance 2019 debrief during Wednesday’s special City Council meeting attracted several community members who expressed concern about the traffic impacts in their neighborhoods. They were especially concerned about the ride share companies using neighborhood streets to bypass traffic back-ups on primary corridors around town.
Park City Council member Tim Henney thinks they will move to limit ride share companies from using certain neighborhood streets during the Sundance Film Festival. Henney says the ride share companies don’t like it, but other communities use geo-fencing applications to manage neighborhood traffic impacts.
“I’ve heard different things. If you talk to Lyft and Uber representatives, you will get a fairly vague response about how difficult that is to do. If you talk to transportation experts, who have a broader picture and see what’s happening in other municipalities across the country, there are places that have put very stringent and rigorous restrictions on where these companies can go and I believe the term is geo- fencing. And it works. And they are prohibited from certain districts or areas, or neighborhoods or streets. And, I think we’re going to go there.”
Henney says even though ride share companies don’t prefer this model, he thinks it’s a good way to manage the traffic chaos during the festival. KPCW’s Leslie Thatcher.
“So, if somebody wanted to be picked up by Lyft at the top of Park Avenue, would they have to just then walk somewhere?”
“Yeah. That’s how it’s done. You have pick-up and drop-off zones and your passenger is told ontheir app that they would have to navigate their way to the pick-up zone, so it’s not, you know, the car coming to where you are.”
Geofencing technology is a marketing tool that interfaces with different apps. It can be used to collect geographic marketing information and defines what users would access when they enter, stay in or leave certain specified areas.
