Olympic committee members ride TRAX as part of Utah tour
Apr 11, 2024, 12:30 PM
Members of the International Olympics Committee got a ride on TRAX as part of their downtown tour. (Don Brinkerhoff/KSL NewsRadio)
(Don Brinkerhoff/KSL NewsRadio)
SALT LAKE CITY — As part of their visit of Utah ahead of a July announcement of Salt Lake City possibly receiving the Olympic Games for 2034, members of the delegation from the International Olympic Committee got a tour of downtown, including a ride on TRAX.
Utah Transit Authority Executive Director Jay Fox thinks the delegation was impressed with what we already have, and by the time the games arrive, there will be several new improvements.
Related: SLC bathed in gold in honor of International Olympic Committee visitors
“We’re going to have a new orange line which will run from the airport all the way up to the university,” said Fox. “We’ll redesign our blue line and the blue line will actually go to the airport and then all the way down to Draper will start servicing The Granary District as well. One of the biggest reasons we have delays on our track system is because we have three lines going through five stops that will reduce it to two stops and that’ll give us more efficiency.”
Fox says the IOC members seemed impressed with how far along they are in their preparations but did want to know how much they’re planning to charge.
“They asked how much it cost to ride the system,” Fox said. “I would expect that. We’re going to have a zero-fair Olympics. I didn’t charge anybody fair today. So I thought that was that was a decent at the Utah Transit.”
He doesn’t think it would be possible to host an Olympic Games without a transit system.
“You know having a system that can move people officially effectively pull the cars out of the area so that we can do our job and I do think they go hand-in-hand,” Fox said. “I just don’t think anyone can consider a city or community or region. That doesn’t have a good Transit Network. I mean, I think they want to know how we integrated with our road network. They want to know how we integrated with bus and commuter rail and I talked about our Central facilities and that’s certainly the good work of our planning people to make sure that people have seamless transitions on our network.”
The committee plans to be in town touring venue sites and meeting with Utah’s Olympic Officials until Saturday.
