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Clyde: We’re not that multimodal

Tom Clyde, Park Record columnist

I love the little ironies in life. For example, the plumbing in Home Depot is always messed up. Faucets drip, toilets overflow or won’t flush. I don’t think the plumbing in the restroom has ever been fully operational. If only Home Depot only knew of a store nearby where they could find replacement parts and the tools to fix it.

On a recent trip to Southern Utah, I saw a huge sign on a restaurant announcing that they were "Now Hiring Cooks." I decided to eat somewhere else.

Locally, we have an unusual situation. The City and County are both doing whatever they can to get us all to park our cars and ride the bus. Getting more people to use the bus is the key to making traffic tolerable. They are spending a couple of million bucks, plus the value of the land, to build a transit center at Kimball Junction. They hope to encourage "multimodal" transportation. They are so into multimodal that they didn’t want the Skull Candy office to have enough parking. Employees would be forced to do something other than drive to work, like park at Wal-Mart. Multimodal is the key. Ride your bike to a bus stop, take the bus to the transit center, and then ride your bike to the parking-less office. Nobody has figured out what you do with the car you drove from Salt Lake, but there are nearly 40 parking spaces at the transit hub.

They will do anything to get us to use the bus, except on the routes that actually are getting used, and then they are trying to discourage it. On the Silver Lake and Empire bus routes, the City has decided that we are entirely too willing to ride the bus. They want us to be multimodal, just not that multimodal. The buses were getting jammed with bikes to the point that it was a safety concern. The bikes were loose in the aisle, and people getting on or off the bus had to climb over a pile of bikes to get to a seat. A sudden stop, or worse, a collision, could send bikes flying all over the place. At best, they were tearing up the interior of the bus and leaving dirt and chain grease everywhere. At worst, somebody could get injured by a flying bike. That’s why people should wear helmets on the bus.

To address the problem of hyper-multimodality they have now put a limit of six bikes on the buses in Empire and Silver Lake. They have racks for three on the outside and three on the inside. Once those are full, you have to wait for the next bus, or actually ride your 50-pound downhill bike up the hill. Because while they really, really, want you to ride the bus, they don’t want you to ride the bus too much.

Of course, there is something unique about the Silver Lake and Empire routes. Most of the passengers are not commuters. They are doing laps on the Deer Valley downhill trails, and the bus is a free shuttle back to the top. The reports were that there would be 25 bikes crammed in the bus, which does seem kind of unsafe. I’m not sure how that compares to skiers packed in like sardines with ski gear set to fly about in the event of a wreck, but both seem a little problematic. That’s why I drive my car.

Deer Valley is running chairlifts that shuttle people back to the top. It’s probably a quicker trip on the lift, but it does require buying a lift ticket. The bus is a free alternative, heavily subsidized by taxes on Deer Valley.

There are a lot of ways the situation could have been handled. For a couple of thousand bucks, they could have bought a trailer and outfitted it with a bike rack. That way there would be no bikes inside the bus at all, and no need to limit the number of bikes beyond the capacity of the trailer. But taxing Deer Valley to pay to shuttle mountain bikers to the top of the mountain so they can avoid buying a lift ticket from Deer Valley really isn’t the core mission of the transit system. The core mission is shuttling skiers to the top of the mountain and dropping them off in front of the ticket office. If that distinction seems like hair-splitting, well, I guess you don’t understand mass transit.

While most of the buses run around their circuitous routes nearly empty, and the City and County plead with us all to use the bus, on the two routes that appear to be successful, and operating at capacity, they want us to stop using the bus. It kind of makes sense.

Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986.

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