As we close out our third year of the parking program at Palisades Tahoe, we want to extend a sincere thank you to our guests, employees, and community members who continue to make this program a success. We fully understand that the parking program requires pre-planning, but our actions in adopting carpooling and alternative transportation have resulted in real and significant improvements to our operations, measurable positive environmental impacts, and benefits to our community that extend beyond our skiing and riding guests.
Improvements to Your Day and Operations
We can all remember the days of leaving home before 7am, sitting in traffic, and hoping that a space would be available on arrival. Now, the parking reservation program allows guests to confirm whether they have a parking spot before leaving home. If guests do not want to reserve free parking on Tuesdays, they can reserve parking weeks or days in advance for $30.
If parking is sold out, guests can choose alternative transportation or plan a carpool, rather than encountering traffic and being turned away at the resort. Alongside advanced peace of mind, this program gives our parking, lifts, guest services, retail, rentals, and dining teams a reliable estimate of expected guests, enabling better staffing and planning. By providing this certainty, the program has eliminated the hours of gridlock once common on peak days, improved the efficiency of alternative transportation options, and reduced traffic impacts on the surrounding community.
Carpooling and Alternative Transportation Adoption
It can be challenging to change behavior that includes reducing reliance on personal vehicles and using alternative modes of transportation, but together, we have done just that. In three years, the number of guests per vehicle has steadily increased, and bus ridership has grown, which positively mitigates regional traffic flows.
- Our Park and Ride program is entirely free and allows visitors to leave their car at Truckee High School or Tahoe City Transit Center and take a TART Bus to the resort on a 15-minute schedule. This season, 10,461 guests utilized this option to get to the mountain. Since the parking program’s inception, the Park and Ride service has given rides to 33,842 people over the past three years.
- If you are aiming to ride at Alpine, the Sherwood Shuttle, also free, picks up from Sunnyside Resort on the West Shore and drops off right at the Sherwood chairlift. The Sherwood Shuttle transported 1,210 guests this season and 5,043 total guests over the last three years.
- The Mountaineer Transit Company served 79,912 riders this season, bringing our three-year total to 291,926 rides. This service is fully funded through a 1.5% TBID tax assessment on tickets and lodging. Not only did this reduce traffic on roads within Olympic Valley and Alpine Meadows, but your ridership also increased parking availability, reduced carbon emissions, and reinforced that convenient alternatives can support more sustainable travel habits.
- New this season, we expanded our carpool program to guests — drivers arriving with four or more people could register in advance, check in at a designated carpool area, receive a resort credit, and park in any available lot. The program was a success and was used by at least 1,301 drivers, resulting in an estimated 5,200 cars off the road and out of the parking lot.
- Through the employee carpool program, employees carpooled to work 6,796 times, which removed an estimated 2,200 cars. Over the past three seasons, employees participated 26,102 times, resulting in 8,701 cars off the road.
Sustainability Impacts
While the parking program promotes faster commutes, its adoption also promotes our local environment. Through your adoption of carpooling and alternative transit since the start of the parking program, approximately 107,372 vehicles were removed from roads, and approximately 893 tons of CO2 were kept out of the atmosphere. These significant achievements were a direct result of more than 358,000 community members choosing shared transit options or carpooling.
Community Benefits
Traffic congestion has never just been a problem for skiers and riders. Local workers, families, and residents were all caught in the same backups. Since the program’s inception, the traffic and prevalence of idling cars have greatly improved. Commutes from Truckee or Tahoe City, which previously took several hours due to traffic, have been reduced to a much more manageable drive. All of this is a direct result of spread-out arrival times, certainty of parking spots, and most importantly, your participation and embrace of the program.
Thank You!
We could not have accomplished any of this without the support and assistance of our employees, guests, the community, as well as our public agencies and organizations that are very much part of the solution. Thank you for being part of the solution with adaptability and understanding.
A special thank you to our agency partners for their support and assistance.
- Placer County
- North Tahoe Community Alliance
- Town of Truckee
- California Highway Patrol
- Placer County Sheriff
- Tahoe Area Regional Transit (TART)
- Mountaineer Transit Company
- Truckee North Tahoe Transportation Management Association
- My Ride to Work
- Sunnyside Resort
