The buses serving Park City Mountain and Deer Valley from Richardson Flat are seeing 200 riders on average daily, according to city hall data.
Ridership spiked over the MLK Day weekend, when average daily ridership was over 600.
Park City Mayor Nann Worel praised the numbers ahead of what will likely be another busy weekend with Sundance.
“It’s working, people are using the parking there to go directly to the resorts and come into town,” Worel said. “In looking at some cell phone data… a lot of people are coming up from Salt Lake and parking at Richardson Flat to come into town, which is wonderful.”
The buses started running in mid-December with a 20 minute frequency. Over 28% of riders have come from Salt Lake City, by far the majority.
Melanie Marth of Trailside took the 7 Grey bus to Park City Mountain Village for the first time Wednesday.
“It’s been great,” Marth said. “The bus has been on time. It was nice to be able to skip a little bit of traffic going into town this morning.”
This year the city altered the Richardson Flat bus routes to go directly to the resort base areas. Marth said that change pushed her to try the service for the first time.
Park City Senior Transportation Planner Alex Roy said the ultimate goal of park and ride lots like Richardson Flat is to capture cars outside of town. His team recently launched a new survey to determine where to look at possibly building new park and ride lots.
“We’re somewhere in the magnitude of 6,000 to 7,000 people coming into Park City daily,” Roy said. “Obviously those periods go up pretty significantly when there’s recreation activities or Sundance coming up, we’ll see a lot more. So we’re trying to figure out how to both capture these people that are coming in daily, and how does it make sense to look at their travel needs for park and ride. But also how does that make sense when we really see our peakest of peakest times.”
The survey, which also asks people about what kind of amenities they’d like to see at future park and rides, can be found here.
Park City Transit runs three buses from Richardson Flat. The 7 Grey goes to Park City Mountain Village between 5:45 a.m. and 6 p.m. The 8 travels to Deer Valley's Snow Park from 5:30 a.m. to 5:50 p.m. The 6 Silver bus services the Old Town Transit Center between 7 p.m. and 11 p.m.
