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UTA needs a serious overhaul. Aside from the furor raised the last few years regarding sweetheart deals and extravagant executive bonuses, the public transit organization has been failing Salt Lake City in terms of services provided. If our city is going to get serious about its sometimes-worst-in-the-nation air quality and continue to be a leader in economic mobility, we need a public transit system that works.
[ U’S RECYCLING PROGRAM STANDS OUT FOR ITS EFFICIENCY AND ORGANIZATION ]
Some of the most noticeable failures of our current system were highlighted by Rep. Joel Briscoe (D-Salt Lake City) during the introduction of HB369 earlier this month (a bill with the intention of increasing funding for public transit in Utah), when he mentioned opportunities to expand weekend and evening services. A metropolitan public transit system with severely limited weekend and evening service is dysfunctional. Public transit users include those trying to access downtown areas, which feature businesses that stay open late, and service workers, who often work much later than nine to five. Limiting public transit access to anything late-night might be in line with the state’s interest in preventing anyone from ever having a sip of alcohol, but it’s not in the general interest of the working public and students putting in late hours.
The more privileged are also negatively affected by lacking services: Recent efforts with Mountain Accord to consider how to appropriately increase access in the canyons for tourists seem a bit silly in light of the fact that UTA offers extremely limited service for Park City and the Cottonwoods and that many UTA services are ham-stringed on weekends, making public-transit-only routes impossible for tourists who are in town to ski on the weekends.
Since Governor Herbert and his friends on Capitol Hill are insisting on blaming Utah’s abominable air quality on car-owning citizens (instead of on the private mineral resource businesses and Air Force test range who are shielded from EPA regulations), perhaps now is the time to start thinking about how to get people out of their cars. An effective public transit model would mean more regular service on existing train and bus lines during the week, during the evening and through the weekend. People can’t use a service that doesn’t operate regularly at times when they need it.
Additionally, UTA should do everything it can to increase the user friendliness of its services to incentivize popular use of public transit. This includes increasing the zone of free transit operation. More of the city should be accessible for free on TRAX. Instead of posting multi-officer stings to ticket pedestrians jaywalking to TRAX stations where there should be crosswalks, crosswalks should be installed.
Paying for better UTA services might mean a small tax hike or cutting into the state’s budget surplus, but that could be somewhat offset by just culling funds from the extravagant pensions of the executives who have failed to run an effective public transit system (that pipe dream of stopping Utah’s public servants from defrauding the public). The cost is something Utah is going to swallow one way or another: Either we pay up front for a public transit system that works or we continue to pour money down a drain of maintaining empty Frontrunner and Streetcar stations, feel the effects of single-occupant-vehicle traffic on our lungs and experience the collected social costs of a service class that can’t rely on public transit for their work.
Public transit in Salt Lake City will become effective only when it stops being a pet project for policymakers and executives to point to and starts being a system adopted by and operated at the convenience of the city’s commuters.
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