SALT LAKE CITY ? It is rush hour ? 8:15 a.m. ? and I'm aboard a jampacked San Francisco Muni bus climbing a steep, winding road. But I am not in the city by the Bay. I am about 800 miles east, high in the Wasatch Mountains, headed for the ski-jumping venue at Utah Olympic Park.
We've already seen much to remember in four days at the 2002 Winter Games. We have seen young men soar 100 meters through the air. We have seen a journeyman Austrian downhiller emerge from the shadows to claim the gold. And we have seen an entertaining international hockey match between two bitter Central European rivals. But so far the dominant memory might well be the buses. Without them we could not have seen anything else.
Though the Olympic Committee predicted massive traffic jams in Salt Lake City and the surrounding mountains, we have yet to be stuck in a single tie-up. And surely the major reason is the buses. If this is not the greatest mobilization of public transportation the western United States has ever witnessed, it must be close. It shows what Americans can do, at least for a short period, when we have no choice but to leave our cars at home.
Like the Olympic spectators, the buses come from all over. More than 1,000 are on loan from transit agencies around the country or leased from private coach lines. On our first day we rode a Tacoma, Wash., bus to the Park City transit center, where more than 100 buses pass through each hour. From there we switched to a Denver bus for the short hop to Olympic Park. Then we boarded the San Francisco Muni for the 3/4-mile journey up to the ski-jumping stadium.
We have seen buses from San Diego, Boston, Minneapolis and Baltimore. More people have probably ridden Orange County Transit buses to Peaks Ice Arena in Provo than have boarded them in Santa Ana this year.
The scale of this operation is hard to believe unless you see it. The buses are moving tens of thousands of people daily, people who want very much to be on time. After our day at the ski-jumping venue, we spent parts of three days at the Snowbasin resort northeast of Salt Lake City, where between 20,000 and 25,000 people have come each day to watch the best skiers in the world. Unlike the Park City resorts farther south, where some people can walk to a venue or be dropped off by car nearby, everyone who comes to Snowbasin must get there by bus.
Almost all of these buses have come from just two parking lots ? one in the mountains not far from the base of the resort, and one in the valley, near the city of Ogden. That's where we board. Arriving before sunrise, we negotiate our way past huge portable spotlights, past a dozen or more volunteer parking guides, to a spot in the lot. From our car we hike about a quarter-mile through the dark, fighting fierce canyon winds, to a row of airport-style security stations. There we empty our pockets of metal objects, take pictures of nothing to prove that our cameras are not weapons and turn our cell phones on for the attendants.
Then we board the buses. As the sun creeps over the mountains, painting the sky a deep purple and making visible an outline of the rounded, barren peaks, the buses wind their way out of the parking area and onto Interstate 84. The passengers chew on breakfast bars and swap stories from the day before, tips for the day ahead. "Where you from?" is uttered and answered hundreds of times over. "What have you seen?"
At times the line of buses seems to stretch almost from the valley parking lot to the ski resort 10 miles away. It takes a total of about 480 full busloads to transport all of the spectators one way each day, with every bus making at least two trips up the mountain in the morning and two more down in the afternoon. It is a logistic marvel.
The program is not without its flaws. More than 2,000 late-arriving spectators missed the start of one race when the mountain-top parking lot filled earlier than expected. And the organizers have yet to find a way to quickly remove all those people from the downhill skiing venue once the race ends.
The spectators are relatively easy to transport in the morning, when people arrive in a steady flow spread over two or three hours. But in the afternoon, when everyone wants to leave at once, human gridlock clogs the frozen walkways from the race venue to the bus line. It can take two hours to board a bus and be on the way back to your car.
But these problems hardly detract from the tremendous accomplishment of the transit system here, which should serve as a model for any community planning a huge public event. It has truly been an effort worthy of Olympians.
Contact Daniel Weintraub of the Sacramento Bee in California at dweintraub@sacbee.com .