The Park City Council will enter into a 3-year contract with Horrocks Engineers, LLC for an environmental study of the Re-create 248 project.
The project aims to reduce traffic on state Route 248, promote public transportation and improve local quality of life by adding side-running bus lanes.
To keep project phases moving quickly, Senior Transportation Planner Conor Campobasso said the $2.1 million contract combines the environmental assessment and preliminary and final designs.
“The idea being that with these two separate phases kind of combined as one, we can start actually working on stuff in parallel, and that saves us a lot of time in the long run,” he said.
Campobasso said the project has some unknowns: direction is still needed from the Federal Transit Administration and city staff are still deciding where to route travel lanes. That’s in part because there are businesses close to the roadway.
Campobasso said it may also be beneficial to fund certain parts of the project separately. For example, the 22-acre Gordo property park-and-ride could be funded on its own.
In addition to the $2.1 million contract approved May 7, the city will need to secure additional funding for the final design phase.
“We're working on getting some federal dollars, some state dollars, as well as county dollars. But right now, we are pretty short on funds,” he said.
Depending on designs, Campobasso said the total cost of Re-create 248 will likely be about the same as the bus rapid transit on state Route 224, or over $11 million.
