Big Cottonwood Canyon’s time was coming.
Any skier or snowboarder who has ever called DoorDash while stuck on the shoulder of Wasatch Boulevard waiting for State Route 190 to open after a big snowstorm or who has painstakingly followed the red snake down the highway at 5 p.m. on a weekend knew that. They wouldn’t even need to glance over at Little Cottonwood Canyon for clues.
Now, according to Utah Department of Transportation officials, that time is here. UDOT announced this week that it is midway through conducting an environmental study to determine the best method of reducing winter traffic on the oft-congested Big Cottonwood Canyon Scenic Byway. The agency plans to present its preliminary ideas at in-person and virtual meetings Nov. 13-14 and will be taking its first round of public comments from Nov. 13 until Dec. 13. A synopsis of the plan is also available online.
Spoiler alert: Unlike in Little Cottonwood Canyon, the top options do not include the construction of a gondola.
“There’s no talk of a gondola, or a train,” said UDOT project manager Devin Weder, “or road widening.”
Instead, UDOT is focusing on adding tolls and increasing bus services.
UDOT estimates between 1,000 and 1,200 cars go up and down the canyon each hour on peak winter days. That’s the most the two-lane highway can handle, Weder said. At the same time, he said officials from the two resorts at the top of Big Cottonwood Canyon, Solitude Mountain Resort and Brighton, both told him they believed they could accommodate more skiers per acre. The choke point is the road’s capacity.
“When you hit that 1,200 cars, you start to get a lot of backups. Travel times increase. And that says to me that we need to get another form of transit,” Weder said. “So if we had 1,200 buses per hour, we would have way more people being able to recreate in the canyon. So we need to find a middle ground of how many buses are going up versus how many cars so that everyone can get up.”
Last winter, both Brighton and Solitude announced they would require weekend parking reservations and put more emphasis on carpooling as tools to reduce congestion in the canyon and in their parking lots. Brighton spokesperson Jared Winkler said the resort’s data shows those actions made a dramatic difference.
“I’m 100% a firm believer it helped,” Winkler said. “Because on our busy days we saw more skiers than we’ve ever seen before. And we attribute that to more people carpooling, more people taking public transportation and less people being single-occupancy drivers due to parking reservations.”
In addition, UDOT announced last month that it will be checking tires and enforcing traction rules to keep unfit cars out of both canyons.
Weder applauded those efforts. Still, he said UDOT’s models show more people wanting to travel through Big Cottonwood Canyon by 2050, which means even bolder steps will likely have to be taken.
Among the options being studied is implementing a tolling gate just below Solitude. That would allow people to drive to popular backcountry skiing and hiking areas like Cardiff Fork and Donut Falls without paying the toll. The majority of people on the road in the winter are going to the resort, though, Weder said, and tolling would help funnel them into buses.
“Ninety percent of traffic or more goes to that area,” he said, “so we can try to limit the number of cars by hitting that area without impacting people who want to go to other areas.”
UDOT has not determined how much the toll would cost. Weder said he expects the toll would vary depending on how congested the road is and some days could be free. He added that he does not expect there will be discounts for carpools. The technology, he said, isn’t reliable enough to accurately register how many people are in a vehicle. Plus, even with multiple people aboard, a car still counts as a vehicle on the road.
“We have a solution that is much more economical and much more efficient, which is the bus,” he said. “Even if you had four people in your car, we’d rather you get out of your car and get on the bus than drive up the canyon. That’s the point of the toll.”
To make that plan work, more buses will need to run routes through Big Cottonwood Canyon. UDOT’s sketches call for service every five to 10 minutes during peak periods to and from a mobility hub that could be built at the base of the canyon near the site of the park and ride. The agency has also proposed “minor road improvements” and enclosed bus stops at the resorts to make the bus system more efficient and attractive to canyon visitors.
Running buses that frequently could be a heavy lift for the Utah Transit Authority, which provides the Ski Bus to several Utah resorts. UTA expects to bring its services back to near pre-pandemic levels this season after two years of much-lamented cuts. Even with a full roster of drivers, however, it is having to turn to a third-party driver service provider so it can reinstate a second route into Little Cottonwood Canyon. Finding enough drivers and enough buses would likely be difficult and costly.
Some of that may be covered by $150 million in taxpayer money set aside by the Utah legislature last year “to provide enhanced bus service, tolling, a mobility hub, and resort bus stops for Big and Little Cottonwood Canyons.”
“I like to hear they’re actually giving Big Cottonwood Canyon more attention than Little Cottonwood Canyon,” Winkler said, “but I do hope they do their due diligence and truly get the data they need rather than jumping to conclusions.”
UDOT is just entering its second year of a two-year study. It expects to have its completed environmental study done by winter 2025. During that time, it will hold two public comment periods: the one Nov. 13-Dec. 13 and another next summer. Weder said the first of those is especially important because that is when UDOT will be formulating its plan. When the other comes around, the agency will already have a draft document in place.
Even as the focus of this study, Big Cottonwood Canyon can’t escape the shadow of its neighbor to the south.
Little Cottonwood Canyon has been the subject of heated controversy since 2022, when UDOT adopted a plan that would ultimately fit the canyon with the world’s longest gondola. Though no gondola is being considered in the longer Big Cottonwood Canyon, Weder said no new policies will be implemented there that can’t also be applied to Little Cottonwood Canyon. And since UDOT is facing three separate lawsuits pertaining to its Little Cottonwood plan, no major transportation changes will come to either canyon until those are resolved.
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