Park City residents can take traffic woes into their own hands this summer, using creativity, bold color, and temporary barricades to narrow streets, slow cars and improve safety for bikers and pedestrians.
The people using the neighborhood streets are the inspiration behind The People First Streets program. Park City Municipal's Active Transportation Planner Austin Taylor said it took about a month to finalize and initiate the first project.
The City purchased paints, rollers, brushes, and flowers planted in white painted tires, which now adorn several crosswalk areas in Prospector's mixed commercial and residential streetscapes.
The project will last only until the snow flies, but Taylor said they'll monitor whether the project improves traffic compliance and perhaps install permanent traffic calming features next year.
"All Park City residents are eligible to host one of these projects or propose a project," Taylor said. "If you visit
parkcity.org/peopleforstreets,
there's a form on there that you'll fill out, and then after that, you'll meet with me, and we'll talk about your project. Usually, we talk about goals first, like with Deanna. The goal was to increase driver compliance stopping for pedestrians in the crosswalk, and then also slow speeds on here."
Deanna Rhodes is the Executive Director of Connect Summit County, and proposed the project because her office is in the neighborhood, along with a couple of daycares, a sports club, restaurants, businesses, and homes.
"And that's the beauty of this project. It really is grassroots, and so the opportunity for people, anybody in the City, to be able to come up with an area'" Rhodes said. "And we've worked closely with the City to be able to make a lot of accommodations. Any concerns we've heard, we tried to accommodate them. I learned a lot personally about streets and logistics and all of that, and so it's been a great experience."
Rhodes said the project itself is an opportunity for community connection. About a dozen or more volunteers worked through the morning painting three crosswalk sections of Gold Dust and Sidewinder.
The reason why Connect Summit County wants to do this project is we really want to give an opportunity for volunteers to come out and reconnect," Rhodes said. "After the pandemic, we've been in isolation for such a long time. And so, we went with Connect Summit County colors, and if you go to our website connectsummitcounty.org, you'll notice there's a lot of geometrical squares, and we felt like there's actually a pretty easy design for volunteers to do no matter what age they might be.”
Eight-year-old Quinn and his mom, Gretchen, visit the Prospector neighborhood because they have friends who live there. Quinn said he paints often but hasn't ever painted streets.
"We're going to help make this sidewalk a little bit wider so that pedestrians feel a little bit safer walking in the neighborhood," Quinn said.
"There's a friend that lives nearby, so we sometimes go over to his house to play. My favorite color used to be green, but I feel like orange or yellow."
Go to KPCW.org to see photos showing how the project turned out. For traffic calming in your neighborhood, you can find a link to the City's application on KPCW.org. https://www.parkcity.org/departments/transportation-planning/transportation-demand-management-programs/people-first-streets
Editor's note: A previous version of this report incorrectly stated Deanna Rhodes' job title. She is Executive Director of Connect Summit County.
