UDOT’s Gondola Math: $1.4 Billion for Basically No Traffic Relief.
UDOT has been clear from the beginning: for every alternative in Little Cottonwood Canyon—including buses, trains, and the gondola—their goal is to shift about 30% of people from cars to transit.
When you dig into the Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) Executive Summary and the Record of Decision, UDOT’s own design modeling actually shows a 31.8% reduction in vehicles in their best-case scenario. In plain terms, all of the “build” alternatives are designed to do the exact same thing:
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Move 1,050 people to transit, and
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Leave the equivalent of 2,249 people in vehicles on the road.
Those numbers matter once you look at UDOT’s traffic projections.
In UDOT’s FEIS Volume 2.A, Appendix 1, UDOT models traffic during the 30th busiest hour—their official “design hour.” Using that metric, they project about a 47% increase in traffic by 2050. If you then apply their 31.8% reduction (by moving people to the gondola, bus, or train), the math works out to this:
A 47% increase followed by a 31.8% decrease leaves 0.2% more vehicles on the road in 2050 compared to today.
In other words, even if the gondola performs exactly as designed and runs at full capacity, UDOT’s own numbers show virtually no change in canyon congestion. Little Cottonwood in 2050 looks essentially the same as it does now—just with a $1.4 billion price tag attached.
It’s also worth noting that the FEIS includes several different traffic projections. The 47% figure comes from the 30th-busiest-hour numbers in Appendix 1, which UDOT uses as its primary design basis. There is very little concrete evidence in the FEIS showing how traffic could realistically grow much beyond what we already see today on that same peak hour—especially when parking is already maxed out on those busy days.
But even if you set real-world constraints aside and accept UDOT’s projections at face value, their own modeling still leads to one simple conclusion:
After spending $1.4 billion on a gondola, traffic in Little Cottonwood Canyon in 2050 would be essentially the same as it is today.
