Asphalt resurfacing project on US 24-285 near Johnson Village.

Follow the money, and you’ll find most of the Top Ten Transportation Stories of 2009.

The transportation funding crisis and the difficult efforts to establish a sustainable annual program are at the foundation of many of the important transportation infrastructure stories.

From Washington to Colfax and Sherman, to your closest light rail station, the disruption to programs caused by the volatility of transportation funding dominated the stories of 2009 – one of the worst economic years in generations.

The entire staff at Inside Lane, together with his wife, Harriet, reviewed the major stories to come up with this list for your consideration:

1. RTD FasTracks

RTD’s ambitious rapid transit expansion fell into a deeper budget hole during 2009. The agency and its stakeholders spent much of the year in a sometimes contentious process of trying to arrive at consensus over how to proceed with FasTracks with limited funds – either stretch out the schedule over more time, seek another tax increase or build only what can be built by the original timetable.

The struggle has been over equitable treatment of RTD’s many communities. Some of them are on rail corridors that don’t have sufficient cost-ridership-benefit ratios to qualify for federal funding, and they would face the brunt of the crisis as RTD proceeds with three corridors that do attract federal grants.

Looking southwest, photo shows Sand Creek Junction at left center. Union Pacific and Burlington Northern Santa Fe freight tracks cross each other here while I-270 passes overhead. North Metro commuter trains could pass through here as well.

The year opened with RTD’s Annual Program Evaluation – a yearly exercise in re-pricing and re-estimating project costs and revenues, showing that costs fell from the 2008 high of $6.9 billion to a new price tag of $6.1 billion, due to falling construction and commodities prices. But sales tax revenue drops due to the recession also drained more resources from the plan of finance, so that the budget gap increased from $2 billion to $2.2 billion despite the falling cost.

The agency faces the same dilemma, but magnified, at the end of this year as it prepares the 2010 evaluation, due Jan. 5. This time, at the urging of stakeholders and with collaboration from area economists and other experts, RTD is assembling a multi-level plan of finance that is based on low, medium and normal forecasts of sales tax growth. This new methodology will offer a glimpse of the FasTracks program that at first may seem confusing, but remember, these are all projections and one thing we know about projections is that they will be wrong.

RTD looks forward in March to receiving proposals from two bidding teams to privatize the financing, design, construction and operation of two federally funded corridors, the East Corridor to Denver International Airport and the Gold Line to Arvada and Wheat Ridge. The prospects for moving forward with the program depend heavily on the success of this process.

Read Inside Lane’s FasTracks stories here.

2. FASTER

Democrats in the Colorado legislature in February pushed through the first new revenue for CDOT and local transportation providers since the gas tax was increased 18 years ago. The FASTER bill – Funding Advancements for Surface Transportation and Economic Recovery – raised vehicle registration fees in stages over three years to an additional $41 on the average vehicle.

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

The revenue is dedicated to replace poor-rated bridges – currently 124 in the state – and repair deteriorated and unsafe roadways. At full implementation, it is projected to raise an additional $250 million per year for those needs. Even so, that is only half of what has been estimated as the current additional need simply to maintain the status quo. And even at that, FASTER proponents have come under constant fire from Republican politicians – often opposed on the sidelines by GOP backers who want to see more money for transportation.

Click on the blue balloons on the map below to see photos and statistics on Colorado’s poor-rated bridges in the FASTER program:

View Colorado’s Poor-Rated State Highway Bridges in a larger map

Republicans argued for more transfers from the state’s general fund into transportation. Democrats countered that the general fund didn’t have the give in it to absorb more transfers and that transportation should be a user-paid system.

Democrats were acting in part on the recommendations of Gov. Bill Ritter’s Transportation Finance and Infrastructure Panel, which spent nearly two years studying maintenance, capacity, safety and other needs in Colorado from the state to the city level. It cited a need for $1.5 billion more per year to maintain and catch up on backlogs of mobility, safety and other projects. The “Fix It Now” basic maintenance portion was $500 million a year – half of which FASTER addresses.

But at year end, opponents of the vehicle fees have filed an initiative for the November 2010 ballot that not only effectively repeals FASTER, but actually cuts the rest of the registration fee to $10 per vehicle, draining the state’s second-largest source of highway funding.

Read Inside Lane’s stories on the FASTER program here.

3. Expiration of Federal Transportation Funding Authorization

On Sept. 30, the rolling six-year federal transportation funding authorization called SAFETEA-LU expired. Well, in actuality, Congress has three times extended it but the rules limit continuing federal highway and transportation aid to less than the normal amount. Without a new spending plan in place, states are hampered in their planning for upcoming projects.

The expiration of the authorization cost every state more money in rescissions – unspent funds they had to surrender back to the federal government to balance out the program. It hit Colorado hard, with $114.9 million in potential spending it had to surrender.

Congress isn’t set to take up the matter until sometime next year. That places agencies in limbo when it comes to planning for transit projects, highway jobs and even airport expansions. It can’t be known at this point what the Obama Administration will support in terms of funding levels and allocations, nor can it be foreseen what Congress will recommend for funding sources.

Read Inside Lane’s SAFETEA-LU related items here.

4. Stimulus Bill – ARRA

The Obama Administration’s economic recovery strategy was led by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which the president signed in February in a nationally televised ceremony in the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

It included a total of $27.5 billion for highway and bridge projects nationwide, $8 billion for high-speed rail projects and a total of $8.5 billion over several programs for public transit agencies; capital construction, equipment and maintenance.

In Colorado, CDOT got an allocation of about $400 million while metro areas and cities also shared in the funding. Rules adopted by Washington required that half of the money be committed to shovel-ready projects within three months in order to stimulate job creation. The entire allocation must be committed by March 2 next year.

CDOT easily met the target. In fact, with bids from contractors coming in competitively low, CDOT has been able to take bid savings and reprogram it into the waiting list of shovel-ready projects.

Read Inside Lane’s stimulus program stories here.

5. West Corridor FasTracks Construction

The first new rail line to get underway as part of the FasTracks program broke into the field in a big way in 2009.

Denver Transit Construction Group, the partnership of Herzog Corp. of St. Joseph, Mo., and Stacy & Witbeck Inc. of Alameda, Calif., sent its crews and its major bridge subcontractors all over the 12-mile corridor area to begin grading, tunnel, bridge and retaining wall construction.

Nearly every bridge is well underway, and completion of the structures will speed the installation of track. One particularly interesting bridge construction job is taking place on the Denver Federal Center, where the light rail trains will cross Sixth Avenue Freeway. Edward Kraemer & Sons is building the steel arch bridge on the grounds of the federal center and in March will slide it over the freeway into place on the piers. This will avoid the need for multiple closures of the freeway to accommodate construction in-place.

DTCG has used several innovative techniques, including “top-down” tunnel construction under Interstate 70, to reduce the need for highway closures for construction.

Work crews prepare the south abutment for the Tennyson Street pedestrian bridge over Dry Gulch and the future West Corridor light rail tracks.

Bridges are also going up over Sixth Avenue and Indiana Street, Colfax Avenue near Golden, Wadsworth Boulevard, the South Platte River and the Consolidated Main Line of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway and Union Pacific Railroad.

Major construction also went through Lakewood and Dry Gulch Park in Denver, with two bridges and a massive retaining wall, three pedestrian bridges and trackway grading.

Opening is scheduled for 2013.

Get video tours of the three construction areas on the West Corridor here for Area 1, here for Area 2 and here for Area 3.

View a presentation on the history of the West Corridor here.

And read all of Inside Lane’s stories on the West Corridor project here.

6. CDOT Sets Bridge Replacements, Road Safety Projects

Using projections for the first year’s revenue from the FASTER program, the Colorado Transportation Commission selected the projects it would do this fiscal year assuming those funds come in as projected.

A total of 41 highway safety projects were put on the list for an anticipated funding level of nearly $80 million. They are spread throughout the state.

For bridges, the commission picked an initial list of 17 bridges to replace or rehabilitate with $63.6 million in projected funding. They are also spread across the state.

But one notable thing about the bridge list is that four of those 17 bridges are clustered along a short segment of CO 96 in southeast Colorado. They are wooden bridges, some of them built in the Great Depression. There had been five there, but in spring 2008 two volunteer firefighters died when outside Ordway when a grass wildfire burned out that bridge and the smoke obscured the fact that it was gone.

You can take a virtual tour of all of Colorado’s poor-rated bridges on the full FASTER list here.

The oldest bridge on the FASTER list for reeplacement is the nearly 90-year-old cliff-hugging Million Dollar Highway bridge over Bear Creek Falls near Ouray.

7. Prop 101

Proponents of reducing government spending have petitioned a measure onto the November 2010 ballot that would gut transportation funding, along with drastically reducing the state income tax and a host of other taxes.

A coalition of stakeholders including transportation advocates has formed to oppose it.

The initiative headed would lop off nearly 25 percent of Colorado’s second-largest source of road funding. It would also eliminate the newly imposed bridge replacement and road repair fees of the FASTER program.

If it had been in effect in 2009, Proposition 101 would have eliminated $134.4 million, more than 17 percent, of the Highway Users Tax Fund from which the Colorado Department of Transportation, the state’s 64 counties and its municipalities receive funding for street and highway maintenance and construction.

The ballot measure mandates cutting the annual auto registration fee to $10, among other things. The fee is the second-largest component of the HUTF, exceeded only by the state gas tax. Together, the gas tax and auto registration fees make up 93 percent of the HUTF.

When adding in the ballot measure’s elimination of the new FASTER fees, which are projected to raise an additional $250 million a year starting in 2011-12 for replacement of unsafe bridges and road repairs, Proposition 101 would take at least $380 million a year from the annual road programs of Colorado’s cities, counties and the state.

Read Inside Lane’s items on the ballot initiative here.

8. DIA Terminal Redesign

DIA at sunset. The airport's second solar generating field would be built on the north side of the airfield near the jet fuel farm.

As Denver hit the mark for beginning expansion of the 15-year old Denver International Airport, the city issued a $160 million design management contract to Parsons Transportation Group to work on the expansion southward of the Jeppesen Terminal along with parking, the FasTracks commuter rail terminal and other elements.

One element emerged as the most controversial part of the contract. The city wants to consider a redesign of the security screening areas that would push back the secure zone out to the perimeter of the building. That would mean only ticketed passengers would be able to get into the Great Hall.

9. Start of Hampden Design-Build

The Colorado Department of Transportation needed to replace aging bridges at three locations along Hampden Avenue in the southwest metro Denver area – Federal Boulevard, Pierce Street and Wadsworth Boulevard. It also needed to reconstruct at least three miles of the roadway, most of which is freeway.

Instead of going the traditional route of designing the work, putting it out to bid and picking the lowest bidding contractor, it decided to package it all into a design-build project that would test the ingenuity of Colorado’s engineering and construction community.

The result is a best-value selection of the team of Concrete Express Inc. and Tsiouvaras Simmons and Holderness Inc. By turning to the private sector for suggestions and money-saving approaches to getting the results it wanted, CDOT is getting more bang for its buck. The contractor team proposed construction staging and methods that save time and enough money to rebuild an extra mile of the freeway toward Kipling Street and to reconfigure the geometry of the Knox Court/Lowell Boulevard intersection to increase safety.

Rendering of proposed new Hampden bridge over Wadsworth, looking south, shows wide room and no center piers, allowing for six through lanes plus left-turn lanes.

Design-build doesn’t work best in all cases, but when a transportation agency has set multiple goals and several facets to a corridor program like the one on Hampden – U.S. 285 – it can put private innovation to work by seeking design-build proposals.

Field work already has begun but the $40.1 million project gets underway with heavy construction early in the new year.

Read Inside Lane’s stories on the Hampden Avenue design-build project here.

And view a slide show of the Hampden corridor here.

To expand to full screen and read the captions, first click on the “play” button and then click on the box that will appear at the lower right corner — with the four little arrows pointing outward. When the full screen appears, click on “Show Info” at the menu bar on the top right.

10. Colorado Gas Tax Revenue Falls 6.5% in 2009

We’re practically back to where we started the decade in 2001.

With the fall-off in driving that came last year with $4 gasoline, Colorado’s gas tax revenue dropped 6.5 percent. This lends fresh urgency to transportation stakeholders’ search for a reliable, stable and sustainable source of funding that allows multi-year planning and implementation without a feast-or-famine cycle.

While the gas tax revenue dropped to just about the same level it was in 2001, the Colorado Construction Cost Index doubled over the same time period. It doesn’t take much time to grasp what it means when costs double but your income stays the same.

A lot of stuff you need to do doesn’t get done.

The fuel tax for the fiscal year that ended June 30 was $539.9 million, compared with $577.4 million in 2008. Vehicle registration fees dropped to $180.9 million, down 2.4 percent from the year before. Driver’s license fees were $13 million, after a steady downward trend over the decade from $24.7 million in 2000.

Read Inside Lane’s coverage of the gas tax here.