The National Citizen Survey Shows Park City is a Great Place to Live

If there is a truism across most of humanity it would be that people like to complain. Yet even given that, in the 2015 survey of “livability” of our city, Park City generally came up all roses.

• 96% of people felt quality of life was positive
• 97% felt Park City was great place to live
• 95% of people felt that it was a “clean” city
• 96% felt our ambulance services were good

So what was the bad? Traffic (shocking). Only 41% felt traffic wasn’t a big deal and running fine (I assume that 41% work from home like me). Another bad was affordable housing. Only 22% felt it was being handled well. Finally, less than half the people were positive about services provided by federal government to our citizens.

The other interesting aspect of this survey is that it was also performed in 2011 and 2013, so we have trends that better help us understand whether things are getting better or worse. What’s getting better?

• Park City is a better place to raise children. In 2011 90% of people felt that way. In 2013, 85% of people felt that way. Now, 93% of people felt that way.
• Shopping quality has increased from 63% of people feeling it was positive in 2011 to 76% feeling that way now.
• Childcare/preschool went form 31% positive in 2011 to 51% positive in 2015.

What’s getting worse?

• In 2011, 68% of people felt the traffic flow was positive. Now, 41% of people do.
• Housing options decreased from 40% of people being positive to 30%
• In 2011, 80% of people felt the Park City government welcomed citizen involvement (something important to me) but that decreased 14% to 66% by 2015.
• The percent of people feeling Park City Government had the correct overall direction decreased from 70% of people to 50% of people.

All in all, it’s an interesting study. Park City as a whole is doing well. However, traffic and the Park City government, may be not doing quite so well.

If you’d like more detail, I would encourage you to look at the entire collection of National Citizen Survey results (related to Park city). They can be found here:

http://www.parkcity.org/departments/community-public-affairs/national-citizen-survey

Update: A previous version of the post said less than half of people were happy with services provided by local government. However, this should have been less than 50% were unhappy with services provided by the FEDERAL government. For Park City, 80% of people are satisfied with local government. Sorry for the mistake.