In this episode Chris and Louis travel to Salt Lake City where they explore how to use public transit to enjoy outdoor recreational activities.
In this episode Chris and Louis travel to Salt Lake City where they explore how to use public transit to enjoy outdoor recreational activities.
On our first trip of the podcast Louis and Chris visit Salt Lake City where they explored the best way to get from the tarmac to the ski trails. This and more coming up on transit tangents.
Louis:Everybody, welcome back to transit tangents. My name is Louis. I'm Chris. And on this episode, we get to share our first trip that we had on the podcast. We got to go out to Salt Lake City. We filmed a couple of episodes there. So stay tuned for those on this one, though. particularly fun challenge. It's been a while since I have gone skiing I used to I grew up in the Northeast skied all the time. Chris and his husband Brent go quite a bit and the pleasure of joining on this trip. Yeah, we go skiing quite a bit. It's the first time that we've been to Utah for skiing. Which selfishly might be one of the reasons that we chose Salt Lake as our first as our first trip of the podcast versus many trips coming up. For the podcast and salt lakes kind of unique as far as you know, you're probably wondering, like, why are we talking about the skiing but transportation to recreation areas across the country really is becoming an issue as more and more people start to do outdoor activities. You see this in national parks, other similar instances like that. But in Utah with the ski resorts, they're having real traffic issues, trying to get you know, so many people who are getting into skiing up to the mountains. And many of these mountain roads are really narrow. They're one way in one way out. There's lots of different transit solutions being talked about there are buses presently, there's plans for potentially a gondola, which obviously piqued our interest. So it's a it's an interesting like case study to go and check out and it was actually like really informative. And I think you might be surprised some of the things that we discovered and some of our opinions on it all. So we documented some of our journey of traveling from Austin to Salt Lake. We met up at the Austin Bergstrom airport, our international O'Hare Airport, airport airport National Airport here
Chris:and then ventured over to Salt Lake, we sort of broke this journey into two parts. The first part was once we landed in Salt Lake, we had to get to the hotel. We did land fairly late. And then the next part is getting from the hotel to the ski resort. Yeah, so let's see how it went. Excuse me, sir, I have a very important question about gondolas and how you feel about them. Where are we today, Louis,
Louis:we made it to Salt Lake City,
Chris:who votes our objective now we
Louis:are going to catch the light rail. And we got to get another one. After that. We'll have a little bit of a walk to the hotel. Ease until
Chris:I was not ready for the cold. So to set the scene of what we are seeing the train station, thankfully, it's only a couple steps right outside of the terminal. So definitely not bad. There's places to sit, but I have to say it is brutally brutally cold. Out here. There's little sign Sony, when the trains are going to come, there's train hosts to help you out and there's little place to activate your ticket. All in all, not bad.
Louis:We are currently at the airport. We're trying to get to, I believe historic Sandy. So we're gonna go to central point station to central point station. Right there. Now we're gonna switch to the red light switch the blue, to Sandy, our math graphics are getting really low to that you have to make an account before you do anything. Because that's totally easy to do once you're like I'm gonna go this unfortunately, we have some time. Yep. Right. Didn't
Chris:have an account. And I made us late. All right, so I think we're gonna, whenever we're using transit, transit, Salt Lake City does not seem to have its own app. So although I think it's a little cool that it uses this. So I guess. Alright, so I need a ticket. I think this is right. Let's call it like tells you sort of the trip as you're planning your ticket, or as you're getting your ticket. The
Louis:one potential benefit of this transit app that does work for like even in Austin, it has all the bus routes and track like stuff on it, obviously can't buy a ticket on it. But if everyone was using it in every city, that'd be pretty cool. That would be cool, but that's never gonna happen. Yeah, so the fair type of thing. Oh, yeah.
Chris:All of these. Here's the bottom of the type of errors you have to choose from. Yes.
Louis:And we're doing It is a lot. So one
Chris:way today we're just going to do one way to get to our hotel correct probably the ski one way tomorrow. Yeah.
Louis:Wow that's very close up on your face cool successful ticket purchase
Chris:successful ticket purchase.
Louis:Let's there we go waiting to activate. But we're just commenting on the chilly weather there are no no heat heat vents or anything that would be a I'm not cold totally
Chris:fine, everything's fine and here comes the train.
Louis:Yeah. Electric. T quiet. But we are at the end of the line. So, just for context here, we're currently, we're
Chris:actually we're actually a team of free today. And my husband decided he didn't want to take public transit. So we're gonna see if we beat him there. Probably won't. But we're gonna live track his location the whole time.
Louis:And he's still the airport. We are moving. Oh, he's moving. Now is he in the car? Is he in a shuttle shuttle. Interesting. So it turned out that Brent actually was already in his rental car and not in a shuttle. We had a little bit of a head start we were on the tracks greenline headed into downtown Salt Lake. well on our way, but he was likely going again on us
Chris:sitting on public transit, according to Auckland rules
Louis:our transfer ended up being very quick. We got off of the Greenline train and switch over to our connection to take us down to Sandy. It was literally a minute maybe two minutes in between, like one minute superfast the audio in the train wasn't great. So I'm going to narrate a little bit of what we were talking to this train was a little bit noisier. Brent, while we were on this train we saw actually had already made it to the hotel. While we were on the train though, he told us that he was actually going to come and pick us up at the train station, it would have been an OK walk. It was about 20 minutes or so. But with all of our ski equipment and everything, we were totally happy to take the ride given that it was freezing cold out there was fresh snow on the ground. And we had just been traveling all afternoon so we took the L there but back in where you can hear us a little bit better now. Yeah, we could have taken a more direct route it's probably my fault wasn't really aroma almost there. I'll take the DL as the kids say
Chris:we've been we've been riding this train and this little whiskey glasses and following us the whole time and all I can think is like Where's where's the whiskey that I realized oh oh, I'm the West
Louis:bundle fumbled up now.
Chris:You like you live in the north again? Yes. Oh, we could have screwed it up. So how was your trip? It was quick and worm and direct to my destination. How long did it take you to get from the airport to the hotel 25 minutes. And how long did it take us to get from the airport to the hotel?
Louis:Maybe an hour and 20 minutes
Chris:an hour 20 Louis first impressions yeah of Salt Lake in the transit.
Louis:I was impressed that their light rail comes right to the airport. Like it wasn't a lot of cities you have to like get on a bus and it takes you there you walk a really long way. The the light rail actually pulls right up to where someone would pick you up or drop you off from the airport in a car and I thought that that was really convenient and impressive. They also have like the train host person there like the train host very very nice. Yeah. And I mean he you know, we had kind of figured out what we needed to figure out already but just having like a friendly face there being able to help people figure out when the tickets you know how to get your tickets when the train comes all that sort of stuff. I was impressed by that for sure.
Chris:Yeah, same I thought I thought the train being there really close is great. The service in town we had to make a quick transfer and the trains were less than 15 minutes apart. I think we stepped out and we didn't even have time to like get the camera ready again for the next train as it approach so the frequency was great for most being able to go from the airport into town make the transfer Are and then head out to the hotel totally.
Louis:And there were a couple of options. And we're going to get into this more detail in a further episode when we do seeing Salt Lake City in a day using only public transit. So if you're not subscribed a good reason to subscribe to or you know, follow or you know, whatever platform you're listening on or watching on to see that, but we had a couple of options. The track system is the light rail system in Salt Lake City. And then they also have a great commuter line called the front runner. Again, we'll kind of get into more details there. But we actually had options of different ways to go, things like that. But yeah, overall, it was pretty straightforward. You know, especially for a city the size of Salt Lake, it's not a massive city are anything and to have the system that they have, at the frequencies that they were running them at. I was I was pretty impressed.
Chris:And this is also my first experience with the transit app. So unlike a lot of cities that may have their own dedicated app, for figuring out the lines and buying your fare ticket kind of concat Metro, we have its own app. There's a an app called transit that interfaces with many different transit agencies, it was very straightforward on how to get signed up log signed up logged in, put in your credit card information. buying the ticket was again, pretty straightforward. And then following the the trains on the maps. So it seems like Salt Lake City has opted to allow this third party to sort of manage that that mobile and public facing app and it worked out great. And I wish more cities used it. Yeah.
Louis:I think honestly, in the future, we could do an entire episode on the transit app and how other other folks could could take advantage of it versus building your own apps. There's definitely pros and cons with that. But yeah, I did think that that was like I was surprised when we saw it. Yeah,
Chris:super easy. pretty seamless, getting out of the airport, to the
Louis:hotel. Yeah. The next step though, of this and we skied for a couple days and we wanted to see what it was like doing this in multiple different fashions basically. So for those of you unfamiliar with Salt Lake City, the ski resorts there and other recreational opportunities. They're basically just to the west of downtown. You have a little Cottonwood Canyon, which has the ski resorts Snowbird and Alta at the top of the canyon. And then you have Big Cottonwood Canyon, which has solitude and Brighton at the top of the canyon. These are both like one way in one way out canyon roads that are narrow. They in the winter time closed for avalanche mitigation literally time is a big storm, little
Chris:Cottonwood Canyon has one of the highest and I can't read the term for it. It's like it's there's an avalanche index, and it has one of the highest risk potentials for avalanche activity, especially without any mitigation. And as we saw over the weekend, there was a lot of snow all weekend, and they were constantly working on avalanche mitigation and shutting down the road,
Louis:we experienced some of these closures firsthand, we talked to a lot of locals, they definitely happen often. And what ends up happening is kind of a traffic nightmare. You know, with people we were talking to, and in our own personal experience, I mean, to go a span of just a couple miles up these roads, takes over an hour every time. I mean, we'll get into some of the details. One of the ways we came home one of the days just to drive down this road took us three hours, particularly last year's are back to our hotel.
Chris:And it's not just tourists who are sorry, it's not just locals who are making this drive, you know, I think of a ski town and I think locals are driving in and out but those who are visiting the ski town are staying at the resort or staying near the slopes. That's not really an option. The way these resorts are set up in these two canyons at least is that there's very small villages, there might be one hotel, it only, it has very limited capacity and super high prices. And it's been very high prices. So for the average person, you are going to stay in Salt Lake City and you're going to drive to the resort and locals are doing the exact same
Louis:thing not to mention workers to who are needing to deal with these. I mean, I can't imagine working at any of these places. But that's like just to deal with the traffic and that's a whole whole other story. But
Chris:everyone is forced to use these two canyon roads, which as we said get closed down pretty frequently.
Louis:Absolutely. So yeah, it was interesting. One of the days in particular though, we had like a really it got more interesting on accident actually started doing it. Little Cottonwood Canyon was was closed down for most of the day this day. So we decided to go up to Big Cottonwood Canyon. We with the goal of skiing at Brighton resort, and Chris and I were destined to take the ski bus. So the ski bus is exactly what it sounds basically it's a bus service that goes from Salt Lake City hitting a couple of different parking rides and then goes up to the ski resorts. In addition to the traffic issues, ski resorts also have limited parking because these are a narrow canyons. So we
Chris:should note that these buses are part of Uta, which is the Utah Transit Authority, correct agency transit authority. But they aren't UTA buses so they are city buses that are for the most part also making rounds through the city. There's a couple that just circulate the parking rides and backup to the resort. But then we had some options where you could literally jump on a bus somewhere in town and that bus take you straight to ride
Louis:board. And they Yeah, and they basically they service, the ski resorts, they serve some trailheads. Along the way, there's a lot of backcountry skiing and cross country skiing along the way, as well. And we wanted to see what they were like
Chris:sound like very viable options, right? You don't want to drive, you don't wanna pay for a parking pass. Or if you're just trying to skip traffic. So we thought,
Louis:right, so we'll talk more about this in a second. But I think we should just kind of share with you all what our experience is here. We're gonna play a couple clips, it was difficult to get all of this because as you're going to find out in a second, it was an ordeal. But yeah, just the very brief overview is that Chris ended up taking the bus, I ended up essentially hitchhiking a group stopped. And I wanted to add another person to their vehicle, because the parking situation is cheaper if you have three people in your car, and they had one extra spot. So I got on the car with those folks. And I was abandoned. Yes, yeah, Chris was abandoned. And then Chris, his husband, Brent, drove up into the canyon. Let's just go ahead and take a look at some of that footage. And we'll talk more about it.
Chris:Louis, what's happening right now,
Louis:we are going to attempt the C bus based on the clusterfuck of traffic behind us. Curious how long it's going to take for this bus to reach us because there is not a special bus lane or anything like that. So not optimistic but you never know. We might make it to mountain. So Chris, and I were trying to take the bus for the for today. And Brent was taking the car again just to see the time difference. And we got dropped off at the park and ride while we walked a bit to the park and ride because the traffic was bad. And Brent was further back in line for the line to just get up in Cottonwood Canyon. And about five minutes after being there. A couple pulled up looking for a third person for their car, and I got picked up. Alright, we'll do it here. 321 Good luck. Chris waited for the bus, waited an extra probably 25 minutes at least. And I got up here first. Nice conversation while snow. So we'll see how long it takes Chris rent to get here.
Chris:So let me lay the scene. We left the hotel, we knew that Big Cottonwood Canyon had been closed for a little bit of time that morning. We were not expecting the traffic jam that we saw at the entrance of the canyon. When we arrived, we sort of mistakenly got out of traffic and drove to the entrance of the canyon, not realizing that the line we were passing that was a mile and a half long. We're just all vehicles trying to go to the same place we were. So that's when Lewis and I decided Alright, we're gonna sit in traffic. Anyway, today's the day let's take public transit, right. So Brent drove into a parking lot near the base of the canyon, he led us out, we had to then go back into the canyon to get to the park and ride which is right at the the entrance the mouth of Big Cottonwood Canyon. And then Brent got back in line to wait for the traffic. And
Louis:this is a pretty normal scene for how people would use this. So the ski buses don't go everywhere. And frankly, not to be a downer, but to try to go skiing from like anywhere in town with your skis, your boot like all of your equipment. We're doing multiple transfers. I love public transit. I do but like that situation as is with the frequencies that they're at and everything just wasn't gonna happen Karis based on where we were staying, we were staying closer to the other Canyon also. So that made it tricky, but the park and rods is kind of what this is like in a lot of ways. It's advertised to be like go park in these parking rides and take the bus. So I think the experience that we had was one that is what kind of what they're aiming for is a parking ride situation here
Chris:but we did we walked through the intersection, we went to the park and ride and waited for the bus and there were probably 40 People at the park and ride waiting as
Louis:well. And the situation there was actually a little tense like, it was clear that when we got there a bus had not come for a long time. And despite there being a schedule, it was clear that that schedule meant absolutely nothing like absolutely nothing. It's buses scheduled every half an hour. People had been waiting there clearly for more than that. They did have to kind of like hosts who worked for the UTA or region three, there were three hosts all trying to keep the peace. And I mean, at one point some of them were saying like, Oh, a bus will be here. Any minute of us will be here any minute. And clearly, they didn't even have any clue when the buses were coming. And I mean, I'm going to take a leap here. I wasn't at this spot for very long before I was picked up by the lovely couple who drove me up the canyon in a nice comfy car. Sorry. But I'm going to take a leap here and say that those people were basically there to like, keep the peace a little bit. Yeah,
Chris:absolutely. No 100% Because you would have groups who were trying to get on the bus that were kind of angry that they had been waiting so long. I mean, look, it's cold, you have your covered in ski gear, you're trying to carry heavy stuff around. It wears down on you pretty quick. And then to top it all off, you have the carpool folks who are trying to get a discount parking at solitude or Brighton they're coming around the circle and just yelling out of their car, right hey, I got to to Solitude i have i have three to brighten. And these groups are scrambling and trying to like ambush these cars to get in. So the UTA folks, while I don't know if it's actually their job to manage the carpool situation, they were doing a pretty good job of like, trying to ease the tension and get people in cars and get them to the resort because I think maybe they didn't know the bus is gonna
Louis:be a while. Right? Yeah, definitely not an ideal situation. But basically, like, as we were growing up, or as I was growing up, we quickly realized that I was head of brand. Yeah. Which was interesting, because he had to kind of loop back around and get in the line. Whereas the car that I got into basically had been in line already. And we, you know, got in the car, it still took me well over an hour. Yeah, for maybe an hour and a half from the base of the canyon to get up to the resort, which is wild
Chris:breading. Well, you were about halfway up the canyon before I even was picked up by a bus,
Louis:which is also insane. Yeah, so I got up there, you know, fairly unscathed in in this, you know,
Chris:warm, comfortable back seat, good company and good Park,
Louis:like we were we were like, I don't know, 20 feet from the lift where we parked. So somebody's like ready to go. Brent who was driving, the parking spot he was able to get was literally almost a mile away. You think? Yeah, we walked at the end of the day. And then your situation is by far the worst. So I'll let you explain what happened. So
Chris:when when Lewis got picked up, I very graciously allowed him to go instead of me in this this carpool, thinking that the bus was going to be right behind him. It was about 10 minutes later that Brent entered the canyon. And I got a nice little wave from Brent over text message. And so I pulled up my phone, my friends, and I watched them proceed up the canyon without me. And it was about 45 minutes after that, that I sat there and I waited for the bus to arrive and the very first bus that actually showed up, set out of service. And they were just going to continue out of the canyon, but the UTA guys told him like, Hey, you gotta get these people on the bus like they've been here a while. There's going to be a mutiny. Get them on the bus. And so the bus driver let us on but then we had to leave the canyon. So after everyone else had waited in traffic for over an hour to get in the canyon, the bus leaves the canyon, we go to another park and ride. That's another way that's about 10 minutes away. We pick up people in that park and ride. The bus was full to capacity. I was lucky that I had a seat because I was one of the first people. I was a part of the first pickup. But I'm still like, I'm squeezing my seat. I have my skis between my legs. I'm like trying to hold those up. You know you're wearing big, puffy jackets. It is not comfortable. And then the poor people who got on the bus at the second parking ride had to stand in the aisle, which I have to say cannot be the safest solution for going up a snowy mountain Canyon. But there are people in full ski gear boots everything holding their gear. And they stood in the aisle for over an hour for us. Actually, it's already more than it was more than that it was an hour and a half from that parking ride. But that yeah, they stood there in the aisle with all of their stuff.
Louis:All said and done. I mean, I beat you to the top by like two hours. Yeah. Two hours. I hit art. I mean, I started skiing I said I feel I feel bad. I'm after I got up there. I was like, really relieved that I was not in Chris's situation, but I felt horrible. I did it was it was very, I was very conflicted. I think we can laugh about it. Now.
Chris:We can laugh about it now. Yeah. Also. Yeah, the bus ride up. It was it was so slow. You're stuck in traffic the whole time because one of the reasons I'm so upset that we had to leave the canyon is that we then had to sit in traffic to get back into the canyon. And then so once we got in the canyon, I think I sat there next to the park and ride in the bus for oh, we went back to the same parking ride. We went back to the parking lot and they picked us up from the first time and we picked up like two or three more people, but we sat there in traffic just outside of the park and ride for another, like 1015 minutes and then just slowly, slowly made our way up to the canyon to the point that I took a nap. I took a 20 minute power nap on the bus. It was it was pretty miserable. I will say props to everybody who experienced that journey with me. I asked a couple people if they wanted to talk about the experience, like I was gonna record a conversation and then like three people around me were like, Absolutely not. So which
Louis:is totally fair, I would I would have said no. Yeah, I think
Chris:also, but props to everybody on the bus for having pretty good spirits the whole time. And we did finally make it there. I know, when we finally pulled up to the resort and the door open, this kid just goes bolting out of the door. He's like, Get me off this bus. Yeah, it was very, really, really funny.
Louis:Now and I mean, it's it was a wild scenario. And there are some some proposed solutions. And we are going to talk to someone in the next episode in depth about one of the solutions for one of the canyons, little Cottonwood Canyon, which there is a proposed gondola to run up this area. It's very controversial in the area. I don't I'm not gonna talk too much about it. Because it is it is trust me when I say it's worth watching the next episode, really good conversation with somebody about the gondola. So, so definitely be subscribed for that. But you know, other solutions, I mean, are issues with the current system is again, lack of a real schedule, because the traffic is so bad. The bus sits in the exact same traffic as everybody else. There is no bus lane, there's no bus priority. The buses not only have to sit in all the traffic, but they also have to wind to the same parking lots that all the people are taking forever to park their cars in. It's It's It's laughable solution, in my opinion, that isn't like you're never gonna if someone did that, once. There, they're never going to do that. Right? Like as
Chris:it is right now. You're never gonna do that again until it improves. I don't think I'll ever I don't think I'll ever do it again. No,
Louis:yeah, no. And again, like where people who want to do that sort of thing. Although, to be fair, I don't know that I've ever want to sit in that traffic to skiing again. The conversation that I had with the folks in the car, who drove me up said it was really normal to be sitting in that sort of traffic. They were like, oh, yeah, like we're lucky if we're ever at the mountain into you know, two hours, let alone what we had, they had gone through that day. To me waiting in line for that long, is not a real answer. And again, there are a lot of really interesting solutions that we kind of discussed at length in the next episode that that is worth checking out. But
Chris:yeah, in this whole conversation, like we understand skiing is, in a ways it's a lot kind of like a privilege sport, right? It cost it cost a lot of money to be able to go ski and we're sort of complaining about like sitting in traffic to do this. Yeah, this activity, but it's it's sort of beyond just the skiing, you have people who are doing the the backcountry skiing, which is a much more affordable and accessible, totally way to get out and enjoy nature. But getting to work, people, people getting to work people who are trying to get to the canyon to be there to serve food and operate the lifts and make this an enjoyable day for for people coming in. You have families who are trying to teach their kids, you know, you may have kids who are dedicated to the sport, all of this has just become so much more challenging. But this isn't a problem that's unique to Salt Lake City. This is a problem that we experience in recreational areas across the country. Absolutely. You look at the national park system, and we have to do time to injury for vehicles because we've just sort of been overwhelmed by individual cars going into these these natural spaces. Right,
Louis:yeah. And whether it's time to entry or permits or things like that. I mean, we've seen stuff like this in Zion National Park and Yosemite National Park. I mean, I've seen the traffic jams getting into Arches National Park, there's all sorts of examples. And honestly, at some point, transportation and recreation areas, I think would be a fun episode to do like more broadly. But yeah, I mean, that's a good point that like, you know, this is one kind of niche solution. One niche situation not so it's not a solution right now, situation. But I think it's something that you can see in all sorts of different places across the country. And what's tricky and why people are so kind of passionate about these, as we'll find out in the next episode is that the places that these are happening in are like really sacred places to so many people, because they're beautiful landscapes that are basically I mean, they're, they're, you know, unique to that thing. You can't once you mess that place up. There's no getting it back, necessarily. So yeah.
Chris:We don't have an answer to what the solution is to make the traffic better, per se. But what we know is that the current situation is not sustainable,
Louis:right. And the person we're going to talk to you next, had some really good ideas. And in the midst of the conversation, my mind was actually changed on a couple things. So I definitely want folks to make sure you're subscribed to listen to that conversation. But yeah, with that, Uh, anything else you want to add? Or are we not gonna
Chris:cover? We're gonna cover a lot in the next episode. So definitely stay tuned.
Louis:Yeah. Thank you all so much for watching. If you're listening on a podcast platform right now and you made it this far, please give us a five star rating. That will be amazing. Or if you don't think it's five stars, I guess you could do whatever rating you feel comfortable with, right? Unless it's less than five stars. And if you're watching on YouTube, please hit the like button, leave a comment. We definitely want to hear your feedback. You can follow us on any of the socials that will be linked down below. But without further ado, thank you all so much and we'll see you on Tuesday of next week. I'm
Unknown:saving that dough. Public transitory reset watch me go