As part of Park City’s project to address traffic circulation and access in Old Town, one item is getting particular pushback from the community.
Park City Council member Lynn Ware Peek says while city staff is working on studies for a permanent solution to Main Street traffic spilling into residential neighborhoods, they are also looking for a short-term solution. One consideration is a turnaround area at the bottom of Hillside Avenue. The city will start by painting the area, but if it’s deemed successful, it could become memorialized in concrete.
“When traffic mistakenly—and usually it's tourists we think, or the number show—go up out of Main Street into the residential area they really just looking for a way to turn around and come back down Main Street,” Ware Peek explained. “The idea is there's not enough room to do that currently at the top of Swede and Main so they would do it up there hoping to stave off more traffic that makes its way back out Hillside.”
Hillside resident Jory Fisher believes commercial vehicles driving past upper Main Street is the larger part of the issue. She moved her family from Deer Valley Drive to Hillside Avenue because she didn’t want to be on a thoroughfare.
“I would say that 95% of the vehicles that come up the road, at least during the wintertime, are commercial vehicles,” Fisher said. “I have two little kids that are running out in front of the house to get the trolley or across the street to the parking lot. I feel like adding a roundabout painted or not, is sending the wrong message to those vehicles. What you're saying is that's OK come on up here and just turn around. They shouldn't be up there at all. There needs to be some sort of enforcement in place for the policies that were intended back when the road was narrowed.”
The three Old Town residents who spoke at Thursday’s city council meeting oppose the temporary fix becoming a permanent solution.
One of those residents, Doug Stevens, pointed out one temporary fix that seemed successful. Last weekend, Park City put up a barricade near Grappa at the top of Main for a special event. The sign let traffic know it was a residential area.
“I was surprised how well it worked,” Stevens continued. “It still would have allowed for traffic coming down Hillside Ave and down Main Street, but I've noticed throughout the day—even though it was a stormy day—we didn't even have much traffic coming down. So, for some reason the traffic patterns were changing just from that simple barricade. The sign came down at the end of the special event and sure enough the traffic started coming again. I think there may be other simpler solutions, but I really would hope we could focus more on a long-term solution with a roundabout. Something that keeps the traffic inside the commercial district at the top of the Swede Alley and Main Street.”
Ware Peek says the success of the sign indicates a large part of the traffic in the area does come from tourists errantly driving into the residential neighborhood. Ware Peek says her original response to the issue was putting up a no-left-turn sign from those coming down the Mine Road onto Hillside.
“But that was a very simplistic view,” Ware Peek explained. “We have to look and study what happens if we preclude everyone from turning left there that's coming down. What does that do to the residents on Marsac? What does that do to the roundabout and so on and so forth? This is what we're looking at and I think it's very easy for us to--where we live is important to us— look towards our own particular personal solutions thinking that that should solve the problem when we fail to look at the balance and all of the people, stakeholders, involved. We want locals first, but we have to remember there are many locals who own businesses on Main Street and that's their livelihood.”
Other parts of the project include three drop-and-load locations for commercial vehicles at Chimayo; Wasatch Brew Pub; and Tupelo; and three staging areas: at the Post Office; Swede Alley; and the 9th Street trolley turnaround.
