After a night out in Salt Lake City, making it home safely can mean paying pricey fees for high-demand Ubers or Lyfts — since TRAX and bus service isn’t typically an option for Utahns after 1 a.m.
“Right now, I can’t use TRAX for events downtown (for example, the opera) because it doesn’t operate late enough to get me home afterward,” one resident said in a public comment to the Utah Transit Authority last spring.
“We need more buses later than 9:30 [p.m.],” another resident wrote to the agency. “This is my main source of transportation and it’s frustrating not being able to get home from work at 11 PM.”
The Utah Transit Authority currently operates rail, bus service and other transit options from around 4 a.m. to nearly 1 a.m daily, depending on the route and mode of transportation.
Why not after 1 a.m.? Officials say there just isn’t enough demand. But that could change if more Utahns ride transit during the late-night hours already offered.
UTA has offered late-night service before
The agency previously offered late-night service until just after 1 a.m. during a pilot program from 2003-2010, but ultimately cut the service due to a lack of ridership — a dearth that UTA officials still believe persists today.
“At the moment, as we see it, there’s not enough ridership during that time to provide that service,” said UTA spokesman Carl Arky, though he admitted Salt Lake City is “a lot different than it was” during the pilot program, pointing to a bigger population and completed developments such as the City Creek Center since then, as examples.
In the summer of 2021, the agency also experimented with a late-night, on-demand transit option, where patrons could get a ride from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. through a ride-share app. The service connected riders with similar destinations to transport multiple passengers at once in what the agency called “corner-to-corner service.”
The program ran on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays from May 27, 2021 through Sept. 6, 2021, and performed 588 rides over those 45 days — an average of only about 13 per night. Patrons paid about $2.50 each way for the service, but the program’s operational expenses totaled to over $81,000.
“That’s a good learning experience for us,” Arky said.
Can passengers expect later hours?
UTA is considering offering late-night and early-morning service every 15 minutes to and from Salt Lake City International Airport, Arky said. The service would involve buses that connect Salt Lake Central Station to the airport to 5600 West and back.
This proposed route is in the agency’s 2023-2027 service plan and is intended to begin in August 2027, according to the plan website — although the plan doesn’t specify how early or how late the service would run.
Aside from the airport plan, Arky said the door is always open for local leaders and communities to approach UTA with ideas to fill need for expanded transit hours. The 2021 pilot program, for example, was developed through a partnership with the Downtown Alliance.
“I think over time there’ll be some trials, and there’ll be some pilot programs to try to assess what ridership is, and to see if the demand has grown,” Arky said.
He noted that if the Salt Lake Valley becomes a community with more late-night or graveyard shifts, and workers are in need of late-night transit service, “maybe it grows organically that way, and we see that.”
“Maybe it’s not just people who are going out on the town and would take advantage of late-night service,” he continued.
But any possible extension of hours would likely not involve TRAX, Arky said, because of how expensive and difficult it is to run rail operations.
Union Pacific also uses TRAX rails to conduct freight operations overnight, Arky said, noting the company was “very generous” to allow extended TRAX service during NBA All-Star Game events.
“It’s pretty much a one-time proposition right now,” Arky said of that temporary extended service through Feb. 21. “But that doesn’t mean that we’re ruling out extended service in the future.”
“We’re just not quite there yet with ridership,” he said, and the agency will “continue to monitor that.”