39 hours NOT 20 peak days

FROM the Editor-In-Chief of Utah Business.com:

“The gondola isn’t the problem—our workweek is.

For years there has been a debate about what we should do with Little Cottonwood Canyon where, every winter, thousands of cars create a two-hour-long queue up to the ski destinations Snowbird and Alta Ski Area. To solve for this, the Utah Department of Transportation proposed two options: We could widen the road and build a bus system, or we could build a gondola. Both cost in the $500 millions.

The problem with both plans is that traffic isn’t bad every single day—it’s only bad on “peak days.” When I reached out to UDOT to clarify the term “peak days,” they told me they were solving for periods when traffic in the canyon exceeds 1,000 vehicles an hour, and there are 36 of those every winter—usually on weekends, holidays, and storms—and only three the rest of the year.

In other words, this whole $500 million thing is being built to solve the 39 hours a year that traffic is bad because people want to go skiing. The problem isn’t too many cars—it’s too many cars on the weekends. And that’s true not just in Little Cottonwood Canyon but also in Big Cottonwood Canyon, our state parks, our campgrounds, and our national parks.

Now it doesn’t sound like a transportation problem—it sounds like a business problem. After all, the only reason peak days fall on the weekends is because most of the people living in the valley work on the weekdays. And the only reason we work on the weekdays is because, in 1926, Henry Ford adopted that model for his factory workers.

So now I wonder: If one company can convert almost the entire world to a Monday through Friday workweek, can another change the workweek once again and alleviate our canyons? Companies have already become more nimble during the pandemic. Remote work has alleviated rush hour traffic and improved Utah’s air quality. Could we also adopt an asynchronous workweek and solve our traffic problem for much less than $500 million?

I’d argue that, at some point, we’re going to have to. It’s not sustainable to have the entire world working and recreating at the exact same time and on the exact same holidays—there are too many of us. We’ve already widened 1-15 to six lanes just to solve for rush hour, and now we’re contemplating spending millions on Little Cottonwood Canyon just to solve for 39 hours. Instead, we could just shift the workweek, ask employees to work the five days of their choosing, and spread that traffic out.

The question isn’t whether we will do it or even when—it’s which company is going to be the first?

Sincerely,

Elle Griffin
Editor-In-Chief”