How Denver Is Becoming the Most Advanced Transit City in the West
citylab.com
citylab.com
The Denver area really does have good mass transit, though - the Southwest suburbs are now well-served by light rail, the airport will have rail service soon, and the bus system is reasonable (as bus systems go), albeit with extremely high fares.
There's going to be light rail to South Westminster (South of 72nd), but the train tracks to Longmont are only being "researched," aren't part of this phase of construction, and are one of the reasons RTD are trying to pass an additional 0.4% sales tax.
The original concept was that the Northwest Rail project would proceed along with the other rail projects - to the point that housing developments like Steel Yards were built next to Boulder Junction in anticipation of the "coming train station." The original project plan involved running RTD and BNSF freight trains on the same shared, standard-width, diesel-powered rail line, not unlike Caltrain in the Bay. You can see that map here: http://www.rtd-fastracks.com/media/uploads/nw/2009-0715_NWR_... (stations in Red were purportedly "funded" by the 2004 tax).
That plan was scrapped for a variety of reasons: RTD couldn't come to an agreement with BNSF, they would have had to use eminent domain and pay a lot to build a rail yard, and they straight up mismanaged and ran out of money.
The new plan is that there's no plan: RTD are conducting a "Northwest Area Mobility Study" and even if an additional tax were to pass, it's unlikely we'd see a working rail line until the mid-2020s at the earliest: http://www.rtd-fastracks.com/nw_1
I am somewhat glad that the diesel-powered rail didn't work out. I would much rather have some type of electric-powered rail. But any rail line is better than none.
As for the line up to Boulder, blame the expense of building a completely separate right-of-way along the BNSF Brush Subdivision, a very busy funnel for coal trains :-/
They weren't trying to build separate right-of-way - they were trying to lease the existing BNSF tracks:
http://www.denverpost.com/ci_20782125/rtd-stunned-by-bnsfs-c...
You're right that the busy freight corridor is a lot of the problem, though.
No kidding. Last I heard the proposed Light Rail extension might not even make it to Boulder. Longmont and Lafayette are most likely screwed. Personally I'd like to see a justification for how the rail west to Golden (which stops short no less) got priority over the airport or Boulder.
> The Denver area really does have good mass transit, though
Agreed. As far as American mass transit systems go RTD is pretty good. At least it's an integrated system unlike the mess in the SF Bay area.
Apart from the NW corridor complete fiasco, yes FasTracks is really quite nice in other areas of Denver-metro.
Depends greatly on how well you treat the roads. I'm from Norway, and we have areas where you'll not be able to see over the snow when driving at certain times of winter, and keeping the buses running is usually not a big problem, as long as the roads gets cleared regularly.
> unlike rail which has fewer problems in inclement weather
... also depends on how prepared they are. I now live in the UK, and here a few cm of snow causes the train network to grind to a stand-still while they struggle to keep the track clear, while in Norway, the trains on many lines are equipped with snow-ploughs during the winter.
I wonder if, in a political science game theory sense, this is similar to the "red states get the most government spending" phenomenon. That is, it's unlikely that the people of Boulder would ever vote against rapid transit projects. So, a rapid transit program can have political success without serving those "reliable" voters as well as it serves more fickle areas, whose votes could change if they become unhappy with the program.
I wonder if the rise of Uber will affect this.
When I lived in Seattle, I noticed that a lot of people didn't commute to work via car but had one anyway, usually for one or two trips per week. Public transportation (buses and later light rail) were pretty good from about 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. or so during weekdays but were horrible the rest of the time. Bikes could be used intermittently.
Uber does an amazing job of filling in the gap. Last time I visited Seattle, I was struck by how some of my friends had given up cars, despite rising incomes, largely due to Uber. Uber may play a key role in getting rid of a lot of cars that are only marginally utilized, since it appears far more reliable and friendly than taxis—virtually all Seattlites who have to use Seattle taxis hate them. This has environmental and other implications.
Having Uber or great public transportation will not change the fact that much of the draw of Colorado is that you can drive two hours and end up in the mountains or on the plains. Colorado self-selects for cars and they will not be going away any time soon.
As a side note - can't you drive two hours to a mountain from most East Coast cities? The Catskills are only 2.5 hours from NYC. I thought mountains were much more accessible in Denver than a two-hour car ride.
That said, once a car isn't needed for day-to-day life in multiple neighborhoods in a city, and likewise once relaxed parking space requirements make it such that keeping a rarely-used car isn't trivially easy, (and especially an economy where reliable used cars have become far more valuable and unnecessary line-items in the budget might be quickly removed) the economics for young adults tilt pretty heavily toward tossing in gas money to with your car-owning friends or renting a car for $100 every few weekends when desiring a trip to the mountains. And urban families might become one-used-car-kept-for-10+-years families as opposed to one-car-per-adult families.
My understanding is also that Denver has a pretty-decent network of bike trails and a relatively-mild climate, which also means two-to-five mile trips can be pretty easily covered without a car.
Of course Denver won't become New York— but it stands a chance of becoming less of an auto-required city and more like the DC area, which is a relatively young metro area for the East Coast with a mass transit system from the modern era and new urban nodes at outer transit stops, and many people still own cars but plenty don't, especially in the urban core.
This was approved in 2008 by voters in Salt Lake County [5]. Already under works are plans to expand the commuter rail beyond Ogden to Provo (from 88 to 135 miles) and expand the streetcar concept. Additional lines are also currently being studied [6].
Of course, when Fastracks is done, it may have more "track miles" but that will be mostly due to the airport being so, so far away from the city center (~23 driving miles from Denver to DEN compared to ~6 from Salt Lake to SLC).
I'm excited for Fastracks. Can't wait to never have to fill my rental car out at that single, lonely Conoco gas station by DEN again.
1 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRAX_(light_rail)
2 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FrontRunner
3 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S_Line_(UTA)
4 - http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865605797/UTA-named-one-o...
Personally I believe that public transportation pricing should be based on an algorithm to maximize ridership rather than on being self-sustaining. Since the point of public transit is to reduce traffic, people that prefer to drive should be subsidizing public transit through registration and gas taxes.
For example, if you subsidize auto travel, you may pull people away from walking, cycling, or transit, and put them onto a congested freeway. Every marginal person that moves towards car use increases the costs of car use for every other car user. Transit, on the other hand, gets cheaper, on a per rider basis, with each new rider (although this can be muted if transit ridership is heavily biased in one direction, which can be the case for cities with strong central cores and no outer job centers, as half the buses may be riding at capacity while the other half are riding empty).
I essentially agree with you, but I'm of the opinion that if we would stop subsidizing cars, some small percentage of drivers would move back to transit, and that small percentage could be enough to make transit self-sustaining.
Auto-oriented land-use regulations (single-family-only neighborhood zoning, minimum parking regulations that can only be cheaply satisfied by surface lots, minimum setbacks, minimum lot sizes, building-height limitations, etc) also cause buildings to be built so far apart, with seas of parking in between and a road network that's inhospitable to walking due to poor pedestrian connectivity and the danger of high-speed traffic, that it isn't possible for pedestrianism to offer meaningful competition to automobiles in much new construction in the US. And since most transit trips begin & end with a walking trip, transit (publicly- or privately-provided) likewise becomes uncompetitive. And this is essentially all due to government policy, often at the local level but also sometimes essentially federally mandated due to FHA mortgage requirements and the like.
Honestly, I think the defining attribute about SLC was that they did what they set out to do, they did it within budget, and they exceeded ridership expectations. It basically silenced all the ideological opposition and let the projects be judged on their merits.
But both areas -- Salt Lake and Utah counties -- vote for transit.
Part of the reason is that there is no Religious Right in the Utah Republican Party. The local Republicans are libertarians, western Republicans, country club Republicans, and big business Republicans. But that cultural revanchiste Religious Right just doesn't have a foothold in Utah. The organizations that promote it are unrelentingly hostile to the Church (Specifically the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints).
My theory is that the people who hate transit are linked to the Religious Right cultural suburbanists and possibly the Neocons. Utahns may happen to live in suburbs, but aren't emotionally invested in hating the kind of people who ride the train. Also, Utah suburbs tend to be close knit because of the prevalence of one church where the community meets regularly.
[1] - http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/politics/56733855-90/2015-alleg...
But Denver is Way more progressive and open than Salt Lake. So in general it rocks! And we can buy beer at sundays ;)
I recently moved a little more south east, now it's a 5-10 minute drive to the Sheridan station (with lights) + parking + waiting, ends up being still 40-ish minutes. Only takes 20 minutes to drive, and I don't have people practically sitting on my lap.
And that's a good scenario. Denver lacks the simplicity I found in Portland's light rail and rail car system. It was quite clear how to get from place to place. Denver relies very heavily on buses.
Lots of transport? Sure. Most advanced? Don't think so.
Now, if only San Francisco could follow suit and invest in greater transit -- instead of trying to increase the density of already-dense neighborhoods -- we might have a prayer of battling housing costs here. Housing density automatically happens when people can get from cheaper places to more expensive places quickly and reliably.
(Or maybe people will just leave the ridiculous bubble of the bay area, and go to places like Denver instead. Even better.)
It's been great for my dad. He used to have to schedule the Access-a-ride to pick him up in his wheelchair. It was a huge pain, and he tried to avoid it as much as possible. Now he's got a light rail station a block away. He has an ease of mobility he's never had before.
DTC (Denver Tech Center) and Centennial Airport sprawled for miles around with tech companies and their employees who migrated from Southern California.
In the North West (Broomfield) around the Front Range Airport (or whatever they call it these days) tech companies and R&D centers started popping up all around Interlocken including Sun Microsystems.
Boulder is home to a number of smaller tech startups including SparkFun Electronics, and a Google facility downtown.
In the South West Lockheed Martin has a number of facilities that work on space systems (ie rockets, satellites).
Downtown Denver doesn't have much in terms of tech but the city is going through an urban revival and the light rail system is supposed to connect it all together (if they ever build the northwest rail line).
High wages and increased standard of living are a win/win.
Here's a paper & a couple excellent blog articles on the topic: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0966692308... http://usa.streetsblog.org/2013/08/14/jarrett-walker-empty-b... http://www.humantransit.org/2009/12/yet-another-transit-isnt...
From the paper's abstract: "Public transport faces an increasingly intense conflict between patronage goals and coverage goals. Broadly speaking, patronage goals seek to maximize patronage of all types, while coverage goals lead to the provision of service despite low patronage – to achieve social inclusion objectives for example."
I think that this article is missing a huge part of the success of the Denver region. It is not just the RTD but many other factors. The transit efforts are not in isolation.
Denver is a sub-urban city, but they have strongly revitalized their downtown and older districts. Downtown has the 16th Street outdoor shopping mall, all of the stadiums for major sports, convention centers, museums. The amount of new housing units that have been built within walking distance of downtown is huge.
The article briefly mentions some of the projects in LoDo as if they were all part of the RTD, but LoDo had been rejuvenated long before the current rebuilding of the Station.
And there seems to be thought into not just rebuilding the old downtown, but I see this around the Tech Center and Stapleton.
A ring means that arbitrary trips don't need to go thru downtown. Not having a ring means that the transit system models the 19th century layout of having "farm roads" connecting into the "market" in the middle of the city.
Perhaps Denver uses buses to form a ring?
I won't even go up to the mountains during the weekend because I can get stuck in traffic on I-70 for 3-4 hours heading back to Denver on a Sunday afternoon/evening. It should take half that time.
I'm glad Colorado is investing in Infrastructure and passing laws to accommodate Uber, etc...
Metro's "mismanagement" is because it is directly accountable to the King County Council and, thus, to politically-motivated voters. One look at route 2 and its difficult, congested routing across IH-5 shows a prime example. Sound Transit, on the other hand, has an appointed board and can move much more quickly.