ALTA, Utah — If Utah wants skier John Persons to ride a gondola up Little Cottonwood Canyon, it will have to be free.
“Then I might take it, but I probably wouldn’t,” Persons said with a laugh.
“We all try to ski every day,” said Carly Smith. “It would be hard to pay a lot of money.”
Smith and Persons were among a group who rode in cars up the canyon to go skiing in the backcountry near the town of Alta on a recent weekday. Skiers are the group that would be served by the proposal made this summer by the Utah Department of Transportation.
It wants to build a gondola – the longest in the world – 8 miles up Little Cottonwood Canyon. The gondola would pick up passengers at the mouth of the canyon and drop them at the Snowbird and Alta ski resorts.
One thing wasn’t in the proposal: What would a ticket to ride the gondola cost?
The answer has almost as many moving parts as a gondola itself.
The goal of a gondola would be to reduce car traffic in Little Cottonwood Canyon. The current road up the canyon is mostly just two lanes that get covered by avalanches in the winter. New snow also brings skiers in cars who have been known to cause traffic backups for miles.
As part of its gondola proposal, UDOT wants to install tolls on cars in Little Cottonwood Canyon.
“Our initial studies show that the toll is likely to be in that $25 to $30 range,” said Josh Van Jura, project manager for UDOT’s Little Cottonwood Canyon Environmental Impact Statement.
“The gondola fare has to be substantially lower than the toll for roadway users,” Van Jura said.
UDOT estimates the cost of the gondola project itself to be $550 million in construction costs and then another $7 million in annual operating and maintenance costs.
Craig Heimark volunteers as the treasurer for the town of Alta and has been using the UDOT figures to calculate what the cost-per-rider would be.
“I ran a couple different scenarios on the cost side,” he said.
Heimark assumed during ski season the gondola would be full going uphill in the mornings and downhill in the afternoons.
“I came up with what I think in the lowest possible cost of about $90” per rider, Heimark said.
But he’s skeptical of UDOT’s construction and operating estimates – which are based on 2020 data – or that the gondola would be full.
“With my expected level of ridership, it would be more like $200 per rider,” Heimark said.
UDOT would then have to decide how much of that it passes onto fares. Anything left over would be picked up by the taxpayers.
Heimark acknowledges infrastructure projects rarely pay for themselves but says a Little Cottonwood Canyon gondola would not benefit most of the public – just the two ski resorts.
“So, to spend [$550 million] of taxpayer money to subsidize two businesses seems profoundly unfair to me,” Heimark said.
He favors increasing bus service to reduce traffic.
Greg Macfarlane is a civil engineering assistant professor at Brigham Young University who has studied the costs and benefits of public transportation. He said in 2019, Utah Transit Authority, for example, recouped 16% of its costs from fares.
That same year, the then-mayor of Alta came up with a per-rider estimate of $111.
Using those figures, Macfarlane came up with what one could call “the daily cost of using the gondola would be about $17 instead of the $111.”
That would be cheaper than the proposed car tolls, but not necessarily more economical. Just two people in a car could drive for less and travel faster.
UDOT estimates a gondola ride would take 55 minutes. Car travel? Thirty-eight minutes.
“I don’t want to pay anything, to be honest,” said Calvin Giddings, another backcountry skier.
“The gondola is not going to stop at half the backcountry spots,” Persons pointed out, “which is where we ski.”
“I’d rather take the bus,” said Will Ambler, who was skiing with Giddings, Persons and Smith. “I usually take the bus.”
It will be up to the Utah Legislature to decide whether to fund and build the gondola. UDOT recently published the latest round of public comments it received about the project.
The majority were opposed to the gondola.