Yesterday, the family and I decided we were going skiing at the Canyons. There was a Winter Storm Warning, which I suppose, is the perfect time to ski.

I asked, “should we take the bus?”. I feared traffic. I feared walking a mile to the Cabriolet lift with two small children.

We decided YES … as long as we could meet the bus schedule.

We decided to drive into the Kimball Junction Transit Center from Jeremy Ranch and take the bus from there. There is always plenty of parking there and it avoids the painful route back to Jeremy Ranch through Pinebrook.

We imagined the ride in, the short walk from the 7-Eleven to the Cabriolet lift. Heaven.

So when does the bus arrive at the Kimball Junction Transit Center? Good question. I pulled out my trusty “My Stop Mobile” app provided by Park City that shows transit schedules, where each bus is, etc. I pulled up “Stops” to see when the bus arrives at the transit center. It said the outbound stops would be at 23 and 53 after the hour. Outbound didn’t seem quite right… it seems I wanted to head IN to Park City.

After a few minutes fumbling, I went to “Routes” on the application. From previous research, I knew I wanted the 7 Pink West bus even though I wasn’t really heading west. From there I zoomed and finally found what appeared to be the Kimball transit center. There are two icons there almost on top of each other. I found that by zooming way in and then clicking on each of them, one of them seems to be outbound and one seems to be inbound. Ahhh, inbound seems right. By clicking on it, I found the bus stopped at 43 and 13 after the hour.

Ok, now we knew when we needed to be at the transit center and we headed out.

Unfortunately, we missed the bus by about 1 minute. We saw it pulling into the transit center and knew there wouldn’t be enough time to get on it. Missing the bus was our fault… or we could have waited a half an hour for the next bus. Or maybe there is another bus going to the Canyons that would have been workable but I have no idea how I would know that.

So, we drove to the Canyons and found semi-close public parking. It was a little walk but not as long as I had worried about. We were still at least 10 minutes ahead of when the bus would arrive (It winds through neighborhoods between the transit center and Canyons).

The drive and parking weren’t too bad.

Leaving the resort, we had no problem with traffic either. In the back of my head I also thought, “thank god I didn’t have to plan leaving based upon the bus schedule of every 30 minutes.” One less headache.

When will I consider riding the bus again? Maybe next year once I forget this experience. Why would I go through that effort? Maybe if I want to go to PCMR on a Saturday, when parking fills up by 7:00AM.

So, as a reader, you might take this as further whining about the buses. That’s not the intent. In this case, I wanted to highlight the issues, and there are a lot of them to be solved, with an average Parkite in Snyderville Bason taking the bus to go skiing. If you are on a bus route in Park Meadows I could see how the bus might work for you. If you rarely ride the bus from the ‘burbs, not so much.

There are a lot of moving parts, that don’t make a lot of sense, and are hard to maneuver. People don’t like hard.

I went to extraordinary lengths to try it out. I believe most people would have quit when they couldn’t have found the inbound timetable or they would have written it off forever when they confused the inbound for outbound route and were told they had the wrong bus and they had to wait longer.

As I think about the experience, I think there is more to it than the plans to increase bus frequency using the sales tax increase. A frequency increase MUST happen but there is more to it than that, if the city and county want to get me out of my car and on to a bus.

The whole process has to be re-thought if our government actually wants to substantially alter adoption rates. They have to make it easy AND give me a reason to ride the bus (maybe those incentives Ellen Sherk wrote about).

However, it looks like they lost me for 2017. There is aways next year.

Longtime readers are probably aware of our interest in the self driving car. Self driving cars don’t text like a driver does — they are always paying attention. Self driving cars optimize the distance between the car in front of them. Self driving cars maximize the efficiency of cars on the road.

We feel self driving cars are part of the long-term solution to Park City’s traffic problems. It looks like Google’s subsidiary, Waymo, is launching its fleet of self driving cars this month in Mountain View and Phoenix.

That is why we often look at initiatives proposed by the city and county as short-term. They seem to be spending a great deal of money on solutions that will work sometime in the future (i.e., when we will supposedly all park-n-ride and take the bus) but ignores that we will never use those solutions because the future will supersede those ideas (and we won’t ride the bus in mass).

Will self-driving cars be ready to handle complex Utah winters in 5 years? We’d wager it won’t.

How about 10 years from now? We’d wager that it’s getting close. Ten years ago, the iPhone and Facebook were both launched (we’d argue that those technologies have transformed EVERYONE’s lives). Imagine what happens in ten years when technology and car companies are focused on it.

How about 20 years from now? Yes (for most people). Remember 1997? The Yellow Pages were BIG and innovation didn’t move like it does now.

And that’s the issue. The solutions our government seems to be making now, based on 20th century ideas, better work now or in the next couple of years. If they don’t, we will likely have made the best buggy whip imaginable.

If our plans don’t include the extreme likelihood of self driving cars in them, then we are missing the boat.

Where is your car going to park itself after it drops you off at PCMR?

Yes! Finally a use for Richardson Flat.

As long-time readers probably know, we don’t have a lot off faith in the bus system solving our transit issues. However, we always like to hear new ideas that may convince us and other community members to ride the bus.

With that in mind, we received a letter from a citizen who had an interesting idea about increasing bus ridership. If you have a few minutes we would recommend you give it a read.

Transit Incentives

by Ellen Sherk

I believe we can put a band-aid on our transit problem. It might not be a permanent solution, but if residents and visitors give it a try, it just might work. Human nature calls for instant gratification, especially if it means altering your lifestyle. To get people on the bus, let’s offer them incentives: the more you ride the bus, the more incentives you get.

Before I moved to Park City, I lived in an area that started an incentive program for recycling through Recyclebank. The more you recycled, the more points you accrued, which could be used towards coupons. Why not do the same thing for our bus system? All busses can be equipped with a card reader. Every time you ride the bus, you swipe your card. Every time you swipe your card, you get points. Anyone can get a card, whether you live here or are only visiting.

So who’s going to pay for these card readers, cards and the marketing it will take to make this program successful? Vail, Deer Valley and the town of Park City. All three will benefit when people get out of their cars and on the bus. It will take a lot of marketing to make visitors and residents aware of this program, but the benefits will be no more Carmageddons!

But incentives must be worth it for people to change their habits: discounted lift tickets, free lift tickets, restaurant coupons, resort restaurant coupons, event coupons, shop coupons. Go to Recyclebank’s website and see how many different rewards they offer.

We already have a popular incentives program that works in Park City: Smith’s gas points program. And a successful one in Salt Lake as well: REI. Maybe Smith’s, REI and Recyclebank can give us some helpful advice on how to make this program work. If it can increase store loyalty and recycling, it can most definitely increase bus ridership.

Note: If you have an idea or would be interested in writing something, let us know.