"These are the Park Meadows residents I was talking about; these are the users."
Holly McDonald said that to the Park City Council on April 30, gesturing at a room full of her neighbors who had shown up to talk about a stretch of road most of them drive, bike, or walk past every day. The subject was Little Kate Road, the two-lane street that cuts through the middle of Park Meadows connecting Holiday Ranch Loop Road to Lucky John Drive, past the PC MARC and toward McPolin Elementary. For most of this year, the city had a fully funded plan to rebuild it. By August 14, that plan had shrunk to something much smaller, at the neighborhood's own request.
If you live along Little Kate, or you bike your kids to McPolin, or you walk the dog down to the MARC in the evenings, you already know some version of this story. What's less obvious, even to people who sat through the open houses, is how unusual the ending is. Most infrastructure fights in a place like Park City are about scraping together money for a fix everyone wants. This one had the money and the mandate already locked in. The debate was whether to use them.
A Plan That Arrived With Its Own Funding
Little Kate Road was flagged as needing better bike and pedestrian separation two years ago, when the city's bicycle and pedestrian plan identified it as an "all ages, all abilities" corridor with a mismatch: a fair amount of vehicle traffic moving quickly, alongside real pedestrian and bicycle use, sharing a road with conventional bike lanes and a sidewalk on just the north side.
That study led to a $2.2 million grant from the Federal Transit Administration, secured back in 2023, covering roughly 85 percent of the project's cost. The pathway became the largest single piece of a citywide effort to redesign and upgrade 83 bus stops across Park City, bundled together so the safety work could move faster than if it had been funded on its own.
The original design was ambitious: a 12-foot-wide shared-use path along the north side of Little Kate, replacing the existing bike lanes and sidewalk, running close to a mile from Holiday Ranch Loop to Lucky John Drive, plus an 8-foot path along Lucky John itself. To fit it, the roadway would have narrowed from roughly 30 feet to about 23.5 feet.
For a neighborhood that had asked for safer walking and biking for years, this should have been a straightforward win. It didn't play out that way.
The Number That Undercut the City's Own Case
At a February 2026 open house held at the MARC, residents raised the first round of concerns: mixing pedestrians, kids, dogs, and e-bikes on one 12-foot path sounded less like separation and more like a different kind of conflict. By the April 30 council meeting, opposition had grown loud enough that public comment ran over an hour, with what the meeting record described as nearly unanimous pushback against combining foot and bike traffic on a single surface.
City Transportation Planner Anna Maki made the case for the design on capacity grounds, noting that national guidance suggests a 12-foot pathway can comfortably handle up to 150 people an hour, walking and biking combined. Then the city's own usage data came out, and it worked against her.
| Corridor | Peak hourly usage |
|---|---|
| Little Kate Road | 39 people |
| Rail Trail / Poison Creek | 100 to 125 people |
A road running at roughly a quarter of the traffic the city's benchmark trails see didn't need trail-level infrastructure, in the eyes of a lot of the people who actually use it. The council paused the project that same night and sent staff back to redesign it.
Not Everyone Wanted the Same Fix
The disagreement wasn't as simple as "improvement versus no improvement." Sarah Hall, who bikes her daughters to McPolin Elementary and the MARC, told the council that the separated path would make a meaningful difference for the families who use the corridor daily, especially around school drop-off and pickup, when the gap between the bike shoulder and moving traffic feels tightest.
Katherine Fagin argued the opposite case just as directly. At a May 7 meeting, she suggested the project's funds go toward the speeding problem instead, tightening intersection curves and improving striping on the two bike lanes Little Kate already has.
"Maybe we don't need to rip up the road because we already have two good bike lanes."
Both residents agreed speeding was the real issue. They disagreed on whether the fix was a wider shared path or a sharper version of what already existed. That split showed up again at a June 24 open house, where city staff presented four narrower options, none of which changed anything for pedestrians, and the option with the fewest changes to bike lanes drew the most support in the room.
What the Council Actually Approved
On August 14, the council settled on what staff had been calling Concept 1A: buffered, painted bike lanes and a sidewalk widened from 5 feet to the city standard of 6 feet, along a stretch running about three-quarters of a mile from Holiday Ranch Loop to connect with the McPolin Elementary School pathway. No new shared surface, no narrowed roadway, no separate 8-foot path on Lucky John Drive.
Deputy City Manager Heather Sneddon indicated the council would also weigh traffic calming add-ons for problem spots along the corridor, including median islands, traffic circles, green bike lane paint, safe-routes-to-school pavement markings, speed feedback signs, and high-visibility crosswalk striping. None of that is locked in yet. The project now moves into a design phase that includes more public comment before final plans are presented at the end of the year.
The broader bus stop program that Little Kate was bundled into hasn't slowed down in the meantime. As of this past June, 18 of the 83 stops citywide had already been upgraded, with nine new shelters installed.
What This Means If You Use Little Kate Every Day
Nothing changes on the pavement this fall. The road you're driving, biking, or walking today, with its two conventional bike lanes and the sidewalk on the north side, is the same one you'll be using through the rest of this year while the design work continues. Construction won't start until that final design is locked in at year's end, and Transportation Planner Anna Maki has been candid that there still isn't unanimous agreement on the details, even if most residents now agree on the general shape.
What residents on both sides of the debate did agree on, according to Maki, is what they want the final version to protect: safe access to McPolin Elementary, real separation between pedestrians and cyclists where it matters most, and a road that still feels like Park Meadows rather than a retrofitted trailhead. Assistant Transportation Planning Manager Alex Roy has said as much himself, framing the original push for change around the mismatch between vehicle speeds and the amount of foot and bike traffic already on the road, not around building something bigger for its own sake.
If you want to weigh in before the final design lands, the city has said there will be more chances for public comment as the project moves forward this fall. If you're just trying to figure out how your school run or evening dog walk changes between now and then, the honest answer is: not much, not yet.
Keeping track of the small, specific things that shape daily life in Park Meadows, from a road redesign to which bus stops get shelters first, is part of how Miriam Noel stays current on the neighborhoods she works in every day. If a bigger move to or within Park City is somewhere on your horizon, whether this year or down the road, she's glad to talk through what a particular street, school route, or corridor actually means for daily life here. Schedule a personalized consultation whenever the timing feels right.
