Since Sundance Film Festival 2020 is just around the corner, the Sundance organizers and the City Hall are having great concerns regarding what the parking situation will be during the 11 days of the festival.
Last week, City Hall generated an idea of narrowing down the Park Avenue roads to save the residencies from being impacted by the traffic. The Park City staffers wrote a detailed plan and a list of ideas that they shared with the Mayor on the previous Thursday.
The staffers were planning on discussing all their ideas about managing the traffic during the Sundance 2020 Festival. We don’t know how detailed the discussion has been but we do know the staffers wanted to create a narrow street from Park Avenue to redirect the traffic headed to Main Street.
However, the Sundance Film Festival organizers have shown concerns that this may affect the broader road network of Park Avenue along with impacting several venues. The organizers have written a letter to Mayor Andy Beerman in which they have written down all of their concerns regarding the Sundance Film Festival parking and have suggested how it can be dealt with efficiently.
Sundance organizers wrote that letter in order to express all their concerns beforehand to the City Council so that they keep their prospects in perspective once they start finalizing the entire plan.
One of the key ideas outlined by City Hall calls for a stretch of Park Avenue to be turned into a one-way road northbound, the outbound direction. Although, transit buses would be allowed to travel in both directions.
The letter from Sundance to the elected officials was signed by the managing director and chief financial officer, Betsy Wallace who says that there would be an entire series of categories of drivers who will have the permit to get access to Park Avenue.
The list includes people owning or working at businesses in Park Avenue, residents and people headed to the Park City Library. In the letter, Wallace also noted down that there are festival venues alongside Park Avenue as well and the Sundance staffers operate in the Miners Hospital. The Trash trucks, service trucks, and delivery trucks would also need to get access to Park Avenue.
The letter from Wallace also outlines the possibility of vehicles that would otherwise be on Park Avenue causing backups elsewhere.
Wallace questions the City Council if increased traffic on Deer Valley Drive would cause hindrance for buses as they enter and exit the Old Town transit center which is a critical component of Sundance’s transportation plan.
Some of the concerns that Wallace wrote down have been mentioned below,
- The organizers are concerned that their filmgoers will not be able to make it to the Library screening hall and will miss their films. We need to ensure that transit buses run as smoothly as possible so that people trust the shuttle system for their daily commute and make it to the venues on time.
- Restricting Park Avenue might create the opposite result and push more traffic to the residential area. The number of officers/street management and the cost of enforcement will increase and it will become hard to deal with the extra expense.
- How will law enforcement be able to manage all the cars with permits without causing gridlock at the intersection of Empire Avenue, Park Avenue, and Deer Valley Drive? The enforcement will be stopping the cars to check their permit which will cause traffic to stop at a very busy intersection.
For more information on the Sundance Film Festival, stay tuned with us because we will be bringing you more updates.
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