About $16.5 million in road safety and resurfacing projects are headed to the Denver metro area through next summer because of the first year’s allocation of increased auto registration fees under the FASTER bill.

The projects for the area covered by the Denver Regional Council of Governments are on a list of 41 roadway safety and improvement projects funded statewide by FASTER’s first year of revenues totaling just under $80 million. The list is based on August estimates of revenue and could change depending on how much actually comes in.

DRCOG covers all of the Colorado Department of Transportation’s Denver metro Region 6 as well as parts of CDOT’s Regions 1 and 4. CDOT divides the state into six transportation regions for maintenance, operations and regional project planning.

FASTER, passed this year by the legislature, sets an annual Road Safety Fee of $23 for most vehicles. Lighter vehicles pay $16, and heavier ones range as high as $39. There is a second new fee called the Bridge Safety Fee. It is being phased in over three years and started this year at $9 for the average passenger vehicle. Lighter ones paid $6.50 and heavier ones range up to $16. At the end of three years, the bridge fee will range from $13 to $32.

This table shows the fee schedule set under the FASTER Bill to fund transportation road and bridge safety projects.

It has been controversial because of the increased fees combined with strictly enforced late penalties between $25 and $100 that caught some vehicle owners – many who were used to renewing late for their trailers and other seldom-used vehicles – by surprise. Lawmakers may consider some tweaks to that aspect of the law during the next session, but there is also a group planning to circulate petitions to effectively repeal the increases and, in addition, to cut registration fees down to $10.

Auto registration fees – the existing one and the new FASTER fees – all go to transportation system purposes and planners are concerned about the impact that reducing those fees to a nominal charge would do to maintenance and operations, let alone system improvement projects. The state fuel tax, the principle source of transportation funding, has stagnated with inflation in construction costs and better vehicle fuel economy since it was last increased in 1992. In the short term, federal aid has been reduced to 75 percent of what it had been now that the federal transportation spending authorization has expired and a new bill, typically covering six years, is nowhere close to being finalized in Congress.

View US 285 Resurfacing Project in a larger map

U.S. 285 between Bailey and Richmond Hill Road would get a new asphalt surface along with safety improements such as lengthened merge areas at the end of climbing lanes for slower vehicles.

The single largest FASTER road safety project in the DRCOG area is the proposed asphalt resurfacing of U.S. 285 from Bailey to Richmond Hill Road, estimated at $4.5 million, more than a quarter of the DRCOG area’s total. But it is more than a new asphalt overlay. CDOT plans to enhance driver safety by lengthening the tapered ends of several of the climbing lanes, giving more room for slower vehicles to merge into the through lane at the tops of hills.

You can view the entire list of DRCOG-area projects here. The list contains some projects in Regions 1 and 4 that are outside the DRCOG area, and their values are not included in the $16.5 million total for the DRCOG area.

Factors used by CDOT in selecting projects included roadways with extremely poor pavement conditions or narrow shoulders, and those in need of new or upgraded signals, improved median barriers or cables, and projects to add “Intelligent Transportation Systems” such as variable message signs in hazardous locations.

As an example, one of the projects on the DRCOG list is the Georgetown Hill segment of Interstate 70, where a $350,000 project will add vehicle speed detection sensors on the steep grade to warn traffic upstream when it is approaching a significant slowdown or congestion jam.

In the same area, a $700,000 project will upgrade the median barrier along I-70 from the Eisenhower-Johnson Memorial Tunnels to Bakerville.

The other fee set by FASTER, the portion dedicated to the Bridge Enterprise Fund, goes toward replacement or rehabilitation of poor-rated bridges. CDOT currently has 124 bridges on its system rated as poor. In August, the Colorado Transportation Commission selected 17 of them for repair or replacement with the estimated $63.3 million in first-year FASTER bridge revenues.

FASTER fees, which are being phased in over three years, are projected to produce a combined $252 million a year in bridge and road improvement funds. Still, that is only half the $500 million identified by Gov. Bill Ritter’s Transportation Finance and Infrastructure Panel in 2008 as necessary simply to catch up with basic “fix it first” maintenance needs.