Final Post – Group 3

By: Lauren Beckett

For our final project we decided to look at UTA and determine whether or not it is possible to rely solely on public transportation to get around. We found that UTA offers four modes of transportation, although only three of those are well known. First there is trax which is the first light rail system in Utah. Trax is a great way to get around because it is very convenient and it runs in the most populated areas of the Salt Lake Valley. Trax is also great because it goes through our campus, which makes is very easy for students to use, plus it is free for all student and faculty of the U.

The next type of public transportation we talked about were buses. The buses can be a great way to get around because they go much further than trax goes, and they can be more direct. Also the buses are nice because they have express buses which will take you further and make fewer stops along the way. While talking to people at a bus stop on campus we noticed that most of the people who ride the buses do not use either of the other forms of public transportation. They are most familiar with the buses, so that is what they stick too.

The last popular form of public transportation is the frontrunner. They frontrunner is a fairly new addition to UTA and has been a big success. The frontrunner is very nice because it helps travelers to bypass the freeway and still get around quite well in the Wasatch front area. In addition to that the frontrunner is always very clean and useful for both students and business people because they offer free WI-Fi while riding, that way travelers are able to get some work done while commuting.

The final part of our presentation was the incentives and gaps to the public transportation system. For incentives we said that it is a benefit to the economy, it helps cut down on pollution, it helps promote safety by offering people a choice other than driving, and it is a great way for large crowds of people to get to events without as much of a traffic jam. Some of the gaps that we found were in the convenience of the schedules and locations, the weather permitting aspect, the hours of operation and holiday scheduling, the lack of an annual pass, and the interruption of car traffic. Overall we decided that it is possible to get around the Salt Lake area using only public transportation, but that it would take a lot of extra planning, and time allowance.