The idea for bus rapid transit lanes started back in 2012. In 2018, BRTs were chosen as the local preferred alternative after studying dozens of other choices like a hyperloop, light rail and gondolas.
The lanes on both sides of 224 will travel from the Kimball Junction Transit Center to Payday Drive. The buses will then merge into traffic and continue to the Old Town Transit Center. All public transit vehicles, including High Valley and Park City Transit as well as microtransit, school buses and emergency vehicles can travel in the lanes.
High Valley Transit Executive Director Caroline Rodriguez told the Park City Council what was supposed to open in late 2025, now won’t be operating for another three years.
She says they’re about ready to release a Request for Proposal or RFP for final design.
“That design will take almost two years. We hope that we will be in full operation by 2027,” Rodriguez said.
She says the delay is due to the limited bandwidth of High Valley Transit staff.
“We are an extremely small staff. And I will say that your Park City staff has been very helpful and has reviewed many iterations of our RFP, but it was purely our capacity to get that out in a way that we would get the responses we needed.”
One of the biggest benefits of BRTs, she says, will be a 50% increase in ridership and a decrease in travel times, improvements from one to six minutes depending on the direction and amount of traffic. Peak ride times between the two transit centers can be as long as 42 minutes.
While a wider highway is concerning to the Save People Save Wildlife organization, Rodriguez says there is not a single solution for a wildlife crossing that would mitigate the impacts.
“If we were to put an underpass near the white barn, then we would be routing animals into a residential neighborhood,” she said. “That is not the solution. If we wanted to put an underpass from an engineering standpoint, we would need to raise 224 corridor-wide. So, there's a lot of discussion about what could work and we don't have any empirical data to identify a solution. It would be inappropriate for High Valley Transit to say this is the solution to the wildlife problem because we are not biologists.”
The best solution for now, she says, is what’s already been adopted, slower speed limits and signs.
High Valley received a $55 million grant to build the project and purchase new buses. Rodriguez says they will purchase seven new buses and electric chargers with some of that funding.
