Shuttle Trouble: A Transportation Manifesto
It took my sister and I five minutes to come up with a better shuttle system than the one Sundance has had three years to fine tune. Ever since the introduction of the Racquet Club Theatre venue, the once-efficient Sundance transportation system has become a mess of tangential loops that make Park City's traffic problem feel like the Apocalypse to anyone who needs to be at a theater in 30 minutes. This year, there isn't a route that goes from the Library to Main Street without looping around to every other theater first.
As an alternative to shuttles, Sundance is officially encouraging festival-goers to walk through scenic Park City — in the freezing cold and over that special coating of black slush that serves as the mountain resort town's only major export.
To solve the shuttle problem, the festival should take the time-sucking Racquet Club off the main PCT/Theatre Loop and add a stop at the merging of Monitor Drive, Prospector Blvd. and Prospector Ave. From here, a couple shuttles should run back and forth to the Racquet Club — a few miles down Monitor Drive.
If unforeseen logistic problems prevent an express shuttle of this type, a stop at this location would still do wonders for the festival's pro-walking agenda. Moviegoers could hop off before the shuttle loops in the wrong direction, and walk to Eccles, the Racquet Club or Prospector Theatre, taking in such scenic Park City landmarks as The Taco Maker along the way.
For now, however, you'll have to run really fast if you're late for a screening. - Jeremy Mathews
As an alternative to shuttles, Sundance is officially encouraging festival-goers to walk through scenic Park City — in the freezing cold and over that special coating of black slush that serves as the mountain resort town's only major export.
To solve the shuttle problem, the festival should take the time-sucking Racquet Club off the main PCT/Theatre Loop and add a stop at the merging of Monitor Drive, Prospector Blvd. and Prospector Ave. From here, a couple shuttles should run back and forth to the Racquet Club — a few miles down Monitor Drive.
If unforeseen logistic problems prevent an express shuttle of this type, a stop at this location would still do wonders for the festival's pro-walking agenda. Moviegoers could hop off before the shuttle loops in the wrong direction, and walk to Eccles, the Racquet Club or Prospector Theatre, taking in such scenic Park City landmarks as The Taco Maker along the way.
For now, however, you'll have to run really fast if you're late for a screening. - Jeremy Mathews
posted by www.sltrib.com @ 1:41 PM |
2 Comments:
Sorry you are misinformed there is a shuttle from the library to Main Street every 7-10 minutes. Of course you need to be on the right side of the road. If you are standing on the East side abvoously the bus is headed in the wrong direction.
As for the allowing people to get off the bus before the "Theater loop" goes into to the racquet club is a great idea and it is allready an option! The bus stop at the corner of Bonanza/Monitor and Kearns is available to anyone who sould like to get on off the bus.
Obviously you jumped on the first bus you seen instead of waiting for the correct "faster" bus to arrive and then complain that it doesnt get YOU where YOU want to go fast enough. I know the 7 minutes it takes to loop the racquet club is sooooo long. That it might be faster to walk to Prospector from Bonanza. Most theater bus routes are 30 minutes in legnth from point A to Point A again not including traffic jams or accidents to contend with so I'm not sure where you had 30 minute bus rides unless of course you wanted to go from the library to Main Street and you were on the wrong side of the road it would take you 27 minutes. Try and understand how the system works buy a watch ask the correct corrections and you might find that there is excellant service which is FREE by the way and gets hundred of thousands of people to thier destinations quickly and efficently. Please do your part by planning appropriately.
While bus whiz's comment was just brought to my attention two months after the festival's end, I feel I should respond to it for the sake of posterity and in case the shuttle system remains the same next year.
First of all, thanks for the info on walking times. I certainly found myself walking from Eccles to Prospector rather than waiting for a shuttle more than a couple of times and it was a good solution in many instances.
But my assessment was based on several hours spent studying the festival's official transit map. All my comments on travel time were based on the estimates from Sundance's own transit map.
I disagree that a shuttle from Library to Main Street came every 7-10 minutes. While in previous years you could catch the Sundance Shuttle from the library to Main Street, in 2007 you could not. A Sundance shuttle stop was only on the side of the street opposite the library, and it headed to the Yarrow. That was the main point of my complaint. The Park City bus system may go there, but the routes tend to take long detours into the resorts (which makes sense given their purpose. And festival volunteers don't always understand the routes. I can personally attest to waiting more than 20 minutes for a shuttle of any kind.
In response to your comments about the Monitor/Bonanza bus stop, whether the shuttles will stop there or not is somewhat random. There must have been a communication problem at Sundance, because some shuttle drivers would drop off and/or pick up people at the Park City bus stops, and others would only do so at designated Sundance stops. In the case of the latter, the people counting on those stops were out of luck.
My comments were referring to the official Sundance Shuttles, not the Park City buses, which are excellent for tourists on ski trips, but are sometimes a pain for festival goers who don't want to go to the resort areas. The Sundance volunteers don't always do their best to learn these routes, and when you have to change your schedule at the last minute, it's hard to always know the public system.
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