Suffolk has won a $100 million award to build the Cottonwood Canyons Transit Center, according to a November 10 report. The project will serve as a parking and bus hub designed to mitigate winter gridlock in Big and Little Cottonwood canyons.
The new mobility hub, located at the mouth of Big Cottonwood Canyon, will feature a 1,750-car parking garage, 75 employee parking stalls, and facilities to support bus operations and parking. UDOT's Cottonwood Canyons program manager, Devin Weder, told KUER that the garage is expected to be roughly 70 feet tall, spanning four to five stories. The structure is planned for an undeveloped gravel pit on Wasatch Boulevard near the canyon entrance.
According to the State of Utah Division of Facilities Construction and Management's request for proposals, VCBO Architecture and its team had already been selected for design. The agency previously set a fixed contract price limit of $99.5 million for the construction manager/general contractor role.
The transit center is the anchor of phase one of UDOT's canyon strategy. This phase includes a new grade-separated Gravel Pit Interchange on Wasatch Boulevard, an expanded bus fleet, enclosed resort bus stations, bus-priority road improvements, and variable-priced tolling.
UDOT plans to run its own bus service in the canyons, purchasing its own buses to take over from the Utah Transit Authority. Initially, buses are expected to depart the hub every 10 to 15 minutes, with service potentially increasing to every seven minutes to each resort by 2050. The Big Cottonwood improvements are estimated at approximately $264.5 million, with $114 million already programmed through the Little Cottonwood Canyon plan for the mobility hub and the Wasatch Boulevard interchange.
The project's timeline includes final design and permitting in spring 2027, followed by right-of-way acquisition and the start of construction in summer 2027. Weder stated that breaking ground is ideally planned for spring 2027, with operations expected to begin in the fall of 2028.
While this phase is underway, later phases—including widening Wasatch Boulevard, installing snow sheds on SR-210, and the Little Cottonwood gondola—remain unfunded.
Suffolk maintains a Mountain West office in Lehi led by Chief Operating Officer John Kemp. The company was also recently selected, alongside Zwick Construction, to build the 91,700-square-foot Trades and Technology Building at Dixie Technical College in St. George.
