That's one of the the best ways we can see to help control air and water pollution, while reducing deaths and injuries due to vehicle accidents on slick and winding canyon roads.

Master plans for Big and Little Cottonwood canyons have long envisioned mass transit, and the Utah Transit Authority has provided bus service and park-and-ride lots for many years during the ski season. But a mountain railway or some similar technology is probably prohibitively expensive, and the private car remains the choice of most visitors. So long as that remains the case, and so long as ski resorts are allowed to expand, water and air quality in the canyons will continue to deteriorate.

You would think that skiers, of all people, would embrace mass transit. That's what a ski lift or a tram is, after all. But until UTA service evolves beyond diesel buses, or until the canyons are closed to private vehicles (except for full-time residents), we don't imagine that most visitors and workers will choose transit.

For starters, the existing park-and-ride lots cannot accommodate even today's demand. The answer to that would be a valley-wide mass transit system that would be so convenient that skiers could take it all the way from home to the resorts. So far, though, that's mostly wishful thinking.

In summer, meantime, the town of Alta has stepped forward with its new shuttle service. It's a modest beginning. For the remainder of weekends and holidays through Labor Day, it will provide two 14-passenger vans that will shuttle visitors through the basin at the top of Little Cottonwood Canyon every 20 minutes.

That won't get sightseers who come to view Devil's Castle and the famous wildflowers up and down the canyon, but it will limit environmental damage in the most sensitive area at the top. It's a start.

We hope that canyon businesses and transit planners take further steps along this path to preservation.