Utah Officials Have Approved a New Emergency Bus Service for the Cottonwoods Ski Resorts. But Will It Be Enough?

A public UTA bus at Utah’s Powder Mountain in March 2022.

UPDATE 1/26: Reservations for the Cottonwood Connect bus service can be made here.

In the wake of substantial public transportation issues over the past few weeks, a new private bus service is coming to Utah’s Big and Little Cottonwood Canyons for the remainder of the 2022-23 ski season. The new “Cottonwood Connect” bus service will run from Salt Lake suburbs such as Sandy, Midvale, and Cottonwood Heights to the Alta, Snowbird, Brighton, and Solitude ski resorts; service will run Thursdays through Sundays, as well as on holidays, from January 26th to April 16th. Tickets will require a reservation and cost $10 per round-trip; details on how to make a reservation have not been released as of January 22nd.

Approximately $240,000 has been appropriated by the Salt Lake County Council, Visit Salt Lake, the Utah Transit Authority, and the ski resorts themselves to fund this private service. The new service will have a capacity of 784 weekly passengers at the beginning of operations, with throughput expected to increase to 1,120 weekly passengers by the end of the program.

These moves come after public bus service was reduced to all major Utah ski resorts starting December 11th due to a lack of bus drivers. While rumors have been swirling around that the reduced bus service is just a ploy to gin up support for the Little Cottonwood Canyon gondola, reliable local sources have confirmed to us that there are real staffing shortages that have forced the service cuts.

A handful of bus routes have been fully discontinued, while other routes have had their frequencies cut down from 15-minute to 30-minute intervals, or have had their service restructured to run more mid-day and less peak trips. The full list of service changes can be found here.

Our Take

To put it lightly, Utah’s public bus service has been an absolute disaster so far this season. The significantly reduced headways have meant there aren’t enough buses for demand, and on busy days, the buses will fill up as early as the first park and ride stop, leaving no way for those at intermediate stops to get up the mountain. To make matters worse, some buses, even when scheduled, haven’t even shown up. These issues have just driven more personal vehicles up the canyons, which has compounded the already existing traffic issues.

Salt Lake County’s new bus service program is the first effort to finally address the gaping hole in public transit access to the mountains. That being said, it remains to be seen just how effective this new bus service is. 784 passengers per week may sound like a lot at a first glance, but this Thursday-Sunday service looks to only on average carry 196 passengers per day—and 98 passengers per canyon per day (between Big Cottonwood for Brighton/Solitude and Little Cottonwood for Alta/Snowbird).

A typical 40-foot bus has a capacity of around 100 people, and assuming that eight peak buses between 6am and 10am have been cancelled per Canyon—so sixteen total—the new private buses will only restore approximately one-eighth of the cancelled bus service during peak times.

Still, any additional bus service is better than none, and it’s great that the private service will not charge extra compared to a typical public bus round trip. And thanks to the reservation system for these private coaches, guests will be able to fully avoid waiting in line once a spot is secured. However, we wouldn’t be surprised to see these slots fill up quickly, especially on weekends and peak vacation periods. The booking portal still hasn’t been launched as of Sunday, January 22, and with only four days to the launch of this service, it’s hard not to expect that the booking flow for the first few days will be anything but chaotic.

We’ll be keeping an eye on this service over the coming weeks to see how effectively it reduces traffic and increases public access to the Cottonwoods resorts. But ultimately, we fear that the capacity put forward still won’t be enough to address the public bus shortage. It remains to be seen if our concerns are well-founded.

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