6,000 more cars than usual cruised the canyon during Teton Pass closure

Officials see increase as representative of daily commuter volume from Idaho.

JACKSON — About 6,000 more vehicles than usual traveled Highway 89 south of Jackson each day Teton Pass was closed, a 50% increase in weekday vehicle trips, comparing this year with last.

The data comes from a traffic counter where South Park Loop Road intersects Highway 89 and likely reflects the total number of cars that travel in and out the valley from Teton Valley, Idaho, on a typical summer day, officials said.

For those watching the numbers, the increase south of Jackson was not a surprise.

“I thought this was fairly representative,” said WYDOT District 3 Traffic Engineer Darin Kaufman, who aggregated the data.

It also corroborates a number in a 2022 study conducted for the Jackson/Teton County Housing Department: an estimate that about 3,227 people commute into Jackson Hole from Teton Valley, Idaho daily. The 6,000 count from the past few weeks measures traffic that flows both ways. Cut that in half, and it’s almost exactly the number produced in the 2022 Teton Regional Housing Needs Assessment. When the pass originally closed, some onlookers thought the 3,000 number was too low.

The study, based on survey responses, estimated that 61% of Teton County’s 25,000 employees live elsewhere.

It estimated that 13% of those people, about 3,000 workers, live 28 miles west in Teton Valley. About 9% were estimated to live south about 40 miles in Lincoln County, Wyoming. It wasn’t clear where the remaining 39% of workers lived, because the study focused only on Lincoln County, Wyoming’s Teton County and Idaho’s Teton County.

But officials assume those people are commuting from places like Rexburg or Idaho Falls, Idaho, or Pinedale and Bondurant in Sublette County.

“We obviously have commuters from Dubois as well,” said April Norton, director of the Housing Department. Dubois is about 86 miles northeast of Jackson in Fremont County.

There was some variability around the 6,000 number, a fluctuation of about 500 or 1,000 vehicles a day, which Kaufman attributed to normal randomness.

There was also a slight increase in weekday traffic later in the closure, which Kaufman said was likely due to increasing summer tourism.

WYDOT does not count how many people are tourists versus out-of-county commuters. Nor does WYDOT track the number of people in each car. That would take a lot of manual work, which Kaufman said is done most often by private consultants.

But the data also show how dependent traffic is on weekday commuters. While some might assume that the tourism-based economy might show a more consistent stream of vehicles through the weekends, there are troughs in car count charts.

“From a traffic perspective, Jackson has a traditional five-day, Monday-through-Friday commuter market,” said START Bus Director Bruce Abel, who asked WYDOT to parse the data to confirm what his commuter bus drivers were seeing on the roads: hours of traffic. Abel said he is in the process of looking at data breakdowns hour by hour to identify the periods of the heaviest traffic.

Others see the data as a chance to zoom out.

Town Councilor and economist Jonathan Schechter writes about regional data in his CoThrive newsletter. He thinks Teton County faces an “unsolvable” transportation problem. With as many jobs per person as a major metro area like New York City or Boston or D.C., commuters for work aren’t going to stop. But with a little over 23,000 residents, there aren’t enough people to justify a highly efficient transit system.

“That’s why we’re really vulnerable to something like the pass closing,” he said. “The pass closure just shined a bright light on it.”

This story was published on July 3, 2024.