DIA at sunset. The airport has been open 15 years now. DIA Photo.

By Kevin Flynn
Inside-Lane.com

Denver International Airport turned 15 years old over the weekend. A milestone for sure for a facility that had a difficult time in development and construction, and that many critics even predicted never would open or would go belly-up financially within 18 months.

Instead, today it is one of Colorado’s primary economic engines and, locally, a driver for growth. Have you driven up U.S. 85, Tower Road, 104th Avenue or any of the other northeast metro arterials in Adams County? The airport area not only rivals but outstrips the rest of the metro area in expansion of residential and commercial development.

I remember folks in Adams County in the mid-‘80s saying they would get stuck with the noise and the traffic but few of the benefits. It didn’t turn out that way. It’s now among the hottest markets in metro Denver.

With more than $20 billion a year in impact on the economy, DIA is a “category killer” catalyst.

For me, however, there’s an impact of DIA that is more meaningful for metro fliers, and it shows how wrong the critics were about costs. Despite all the fear and loathing that the massive costs of this monster halfway out to Kansas would propel ticket prices out of reach for families and business fliers, here’s the fact: The average air fare out of Denver is lower now than when the airport opened, according to U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

In fact, of the top 85 airports in the nation, Denver had the second-largest decline in air fares over that 15-year period. DIA is the source, and the return of Southwest Airlines to the stable of carriers is the reason.

It is supremely ironic that expensive DIA would be the reason we have lower air fares than when we left inexpensive Stapleton behind. But everything is market-driven.

Southwest never would have returned to Denver without the new airport – a notion that would have seemed counterintuitive 15 years ago when all the discussion was its supposed high costs. It was going to cost airlines an average of $16 per passenger, nearly three times that of Stapleton! But in fact Southwest abandoned low-cost Stapleton in 1985 after operating out of subleased gates there for a short time. The reason?

The overcrowded airfield limited Stapleton to one jet arrival runway during bad-weather restrictions. It choked operations to the extent that Southwest couldn’t keep its schedule-driven system running effectively. The low-fare airline determined that 70 percent of its total flight delays nationwide could be traced to problems getting in and out of Stapleton. So it pulled out, despite Stapleton’s low $6 per passenger average cost.

Now it is back, and it is keeping Denver air fares low and contributing to DIA’s status as fifth busiest airport in the nation and 10th in the world. Not bad for a facility once called “Peña’s Folly” because of Mayor Federico Peña’s incessant push for it. Critics who mimicked the attacks on Mayor Ben Stapleton in 1929 for building what had been dubbed “Stapleton’s Folly” should have remembered that it really didn’t turn out so well for those earlier critics either.

To mark the 15th anniversary of DIA, it is more than appropriate to take a brief look back and a longer look ahead at some of the controversial changes that may be coming with the new master plan.

So what made the news about it? Cupcakes.

Seriously. The lead story on 9News’ 10 p.m. newscast the day after the anniversary was a 9 Wants to Know investigation into the cost of the airport marking the event by giving out cupcakes to passengers and visitors, and building a full-size mock-up of a Boeing 787 wing in the terminal. The new jumbo-craft being rolled out by Boeing plays a major role in DIA’s targeted goal of increasing overseas flights, especially to Asia.

Where is Paula Woodward when we need her?

All airports have marketing. It’s a cost of doing business. And a nice bit of refreshment for passengers like a cupcake is more in-touch with today’s marketing than speechifying at a press conference. But instead of a piece on DIA at 15, 9News told us how some of the workers who assembled the wing model had been told to charge their overtime to the snow plowing account.

Scandal, right?

No.

It turns out the next day after the report, we discover the workers actually were on call-in for snow plow duty, and while on the clock waiting for snow, were assigned to help assemble the model. That’s a good thing, not a bad one. The 9News follow-up to its own story called it “accounted for properly.”

That’s the way the cupcake, and gotcha journalism, sometimes crumbles.

Heavy-rail self-propelled electric-powered commuter rail cars are the vehicles chosen for the FasTracks East Corridor and Gold Line projects. Courtesy RTD.

Prendergast gave a comprehensive look at DIA as a teenager, what its impact has been and the controversy over changes in the master plan that will fundamentally alter the way we initially plotted the airport’s growth.

Getting DIA built was no cupcake, but it has become a huge economic pie.

When you get the time, read Prendergast’s piece here. It’s well done and the only major correction I would offer is that the FasTracks train that will be built out to DIA is not light rail, but a heavy-rail commuter train line using Electric Multiple Units. We need to introduce the Denver public to the fact that the north metro rail lines in FasTracks will not be the smaller light-rail trolley-type cars but inter-city type train cars for a more comfortable trip to the airport.

As usual with a Westword piece, it’s lengthy. Have a cupcake or two while you read it.

Reinforced concrete piers rise out of the ground at 13th Avenue and Wadsworth Boulevard as part of RTD FasTracks' West Corridor light rail construction. RTD projects it will be short of money to build the entire FasTracks program without voter approval for a second sale tax hike. Inside Lane photo.

By Tom Clark
Executive Vice President, Metro Denver Economic Development Corporation
Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce

Tom Clark

Now the “other” news. FasTracks needs additional funding to complete the entire system by 2017, as promised to voters in 2004. Over the past several months we’ve been looking at both the revenue and costs of completing the system as planned. The original price tag of $4.7 billion was wrong. We now have confidence, after much research, that the final cost of the system will be $6.9 billion. Sales tax revenue projections made in 2004 have been proven wrong – thanks in part to the national recession and a financial model that has turned out to be less flexible than desired. There is no doubt that at some future time RTD will ask the voters for more tax money to complete the system. Where will this money come from? Or should we even build out the entire system?

Option #1 – Build out the system with existing revenues
RTD’s recently issued Annual Program Evaluation (APE) notes that the entire system, without a tax increase can be completed “sometime after 2035.” This is good news if you’re an average male, age 49. In 25 years (2035) you will have reached the average life expectancy of American males, 74 years. You will get to ride the full system just about the time you pass away. It will be a pretty expensive ride. You will have been paying a .4 cent sales tax for the system for about 31 years. Bon voyage!

Option #2 – Pass an additional .4 cent sales tax in 2010
FasTracks can be completed as presented to voters in 2004. Even with the most pessimistic revenue projections FasTracks would be ready for riders in its original timetable of 2017. This assumes that already “grumpy” voters in the most uncertain economic time since the Great Depression would be willing to double-down on a tax increase. This strategy, if successful, means that males age 67 or above are the only ones who will pay without riding the entire system before they pass.

Option #3 – Push Election to 2012
A 2012 election would push completion of the entire system to 2019 with a .4 cent sales tax increase. Males who are retiring today at age 65 will still be able to ride the system before they take the big train ride in the sky. If you’re still doing the actuarial countdown with me, a couple of years of exercise and a better diet ought to keep you alive and riding with those in No. 2 above.

Any 2010 election will be an expensive undertaking. Nationally, the Democrats are loading their coffers to keep a commanding majority in the U.S. Senate. Colorado is a battleground state with a sitting Senator who has never run for election. Incumbency, in any form, is not an asset in this election. Many voters are in the “throw the bums out” mindset, regardless of party affiliation. With Bill Ritter’s decision to not seek reelection, the Governor’s race will draw the same national attention….and money. Advertising costs will skyrocket, especially near Election Day. Mail-in ballots serve to extend the time when television and radio ads must run, further driving up campaign costs.

Voters are unsure about their economic future and very, very angry at anyone in office or running for it. Tax increase elections are difficult to win, even if the cause is just. In Metro Denver they seem to have their greatest chance when the economy is just beginning to recover. Then, people are starting to feel a little “jingle in their jeans” and have greater confidence in their employment outlook. A strong showing in the first quarter’s economic reports could give a 2010 election a chance.

(This commentary first ran on Tom Clark’s “Clark’s Cone of Silence” blog at the Metro Denver Economic Development Corp. Click here to go there for other items.)

By Kevin Flynn
Inside-Lane.com

A streetcar line on Colfax Avenue between downtown Denver and Aurora’s Fitzsimons medical campus may or may not prove to be a good idea. That answer depends on studies yet to be completed.

But no study is needed to know that it’s not a good idea to break faith with an already angry electorate by diverting newly raised auto registration fees from the FASTER bill to help pay for it.

State Sen. Chris Romer, D-Denver, has floated the idea of diverting a portion of the total fees – $4 from vehicle registration surcharges within one mile of the Colfax corridor – to a special district that would be set up to finance, build and operate the streetcar line.

Aside from the political and legal problems this could cause, the proposal expands and perpetuates Colorado’s convoluted transportation funding flow chart. If you want to fix roads and bridges, then charge fees or propose taxes that do so, as FASTER does. If you want to build a streetcar line, then come up with a logically connected financial plan that has the people who benefit from it paying for it, without robbing from another fund for it.

FASTER’s increased charges are user fees – that’s the argument for how they pass muster with TABOR.

Since TABOR passed in 1992, instead of asking voters to increase the gas tax, we’ve been increasingly holding the system together with duct tape and baling wire out of fear voters would say no. We’ve been taking general fund dollars in surplus years and backfilling major CDOT corridor projects with it – a feast or famine cycle that inhibits good planning.

So finally, after Gov. Bill Ritter’s transportation finance panel reaches a consensus two years ago that a minimum of $500 million more per year is needed merely to catch up to deferred bridge and road repairs, the legislature barely gets through the FASTER bill that gets us only halfway there.

We were told last year that these increased fees – the first all-new revenue source for transportation in 18 years – were vital to repairing falling-down bridges and unsafe roadways.

And that’s correct.

The Colorado Department of Transportation, which has 124 bridges rated poor, is projecting that more and more bridges will slip below the good and fair threshold into poor condition by 2019 without additional funding.

As to roadway surface, CDOT has projected that without new revenue for its maintenance program, the share of highway mileage rated as good or fair would fall from 49 percent this year to 29 percent in 2019.

Read about that in CDOT’s 2009 Transportation Deficit Report.

FASTER is already threatened with repeal by some legislators and by a citizen initiative headed for the November ballot – which would also reduce total auto license fees that now support city, county and state road maintenance to a flat $10 a year.

Diverting any of FASTER’s fees to anything other than fixing the roads and bridges is politically unwise and a potential violation of the limitations imposed on the state to raise taxes. As long as FASTER fees are spent directly on providing the road and bridge infrastructure to the drivers who are paying them, then they can reasonably be called user fees, not taxes. Siphoning off revenue for a non-highway project neutralizes that argument and bolsters the case of opponents that it was an illegal tax increase.

Under FASTER, the fees go into the Highway Users Trust Fund for allocation to the State Highway Fund, counties and municipalities around Colorado. The bridge fees further go into a separate enterprise fund to insulate them from TABOR restrictions. Diverting those fees to any venture that is not a bridge project, such as a Colfax streetcar, creates a legal problem.

It’s time for Colorado to start facing transportation funding needs head-on, with bridge fees spent on bridges, road fees spent on roads, and streetcar funding that’s tied directly to the beneficiaries – perhaps a Union Station-like special district.

Don’t try to trip up the first bit of progress Colorado had made in catching up to road and bridge maintenance.

Adopt-a-Highway sign on US 85 in Brighton.

But what do neo-Nazis and the Orthopedic Physicians of Colorado have in common?

Well, they both have volunteered to pick up litter along stretches of Colorado state highways.

Now what is the difference between neo-Nazis and the Orthopedic Physicians of Colorado?

You’ll never turn on your 10 o’clock news and see a top story on the Orthopedic Physicians volunteering to pick up roadside litter.

That’s a shame. I thought you might like to know about some of the other groups that are toiling along the roadsides in metro Denver picking up trash not for any other reason than making their community better.

In addition to the Orthopedic Physicians, a few of the others are the Littleton Rotary Club, CU’s Theta Xi fraternity, Brentwood United Methodist Church, Daughters of the American Revolution, Mile-Hi Jeep Club, Regis University Youth Corps, Friends of the National Park Service and Parker’s Four Square Mile Neighborhood Group.

Roadside trash is an incredibly frustrating problem for the Colorado Department of Transportation, county road departments and city street crews. Everything from broken glass, soiled diapers and bottles of urine to meth lab debris is tossed onto the shoulders and gutters by motorists. The volunteers and paid crews who go out and pick this stuff up are taking risks. You can read about the Adopt-a-Highway program here.

But it takes a publicity stunt like a half dozen admirers of Adolf Hitler deciding to get noticed for their civic involvement to get a story about it on the news. With all the serious issues facing transportation in Colorado – from the inadequate and shrinking resources to fix our crumbling bridges and roads, to the assault on funding being waged on the remaining resources by anti-government zealots with ballot measures to cut transportation’s budget, what are the reasons I’ve been seeing CDOT spokeswoman Stacey Stegman’s smiling face on the news lately?

She’s been summoned out in front of the Arkansas Avenue headquarters to talk about either the fuss over the neo-Nazis’ highway clean-up or some CDOT employee’s poor decision to forward a tacky email photo of President Obama and Sarah Palin.

Will there be as much effort to track down the so-far reticent backers of Proposition 101 – which would take away money from repair of unsafe bridges and roadways, and reduce annual funding to CDOT, counties and cities for their road maintenance programs by arbitrarily fixing all license fees at $10 a year – to ask them on what basis they chose that number other than that they want to pay less? How does $10 per vehicle relate to what it costs to maintain the roads?

I’m not actually this naïve, of course. I know how media work, and a band of neo-Nazis wanting to pick up litter so they can advertise their presence to potential recruits is, of course, going to make the news. Truth be told, in the 1980s, I extensively covered neo-Nazis for the Rocky Mountain News after the murder of KOA talk show host Alan Berg, and if the paper were still here, as both the transportation writer and the extremist beat veteran in the newsroom, there’s not a men’s room remote enough where I could hide from covering the Adopt-a-Brown Shirt story.

I can almost script where this story will go. The National Socialists will go out to U.S. 85 and do some obligatory litter pick-up; TV crews will come along. The neo-Nazis will discover that for some reason, their one-mile segment north of Bridge Street suddenly has a whole heckuva lot more litter on it than other segments. Some drivers will honk or yell as they go by. Eventually, their sign will be defaced, and their leader will again be on the news to wax indignant about the intolerance shown to them.

And sooner or later, the whole effort will fall apart and the one-mile segment of U.S. 85 will be up for adoption again.

Eventually you come to realize this was not about cleaning up litter along the highways at all.

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UPDATE: CDOT has announced that the one-mile section where the National Socialist Movement volunteers will pick up litter has been moved northward on U.S. 85 after officials realized the original segment it was assigned had been secured by another organization, the Elmwood Baptist Church. As a result, the neo-Nazi group will clean up litter on U.S. 85 between Bridge Street and 168th Avenue.

CDOT started installing signs this year notifying drivers of its nearly three-decade-old policy limiting overnight plowing on lightly traveled highways.

CDOT is learning that no good deed goes unpunished.

For nearly 30 years it has had a practice during snowstorms of not plowing state highways that had light traffic during the overnight shift. Those highways were plowed 14 hours out of the day during storms, from 5 a.m. to 7 p.m., if they served fewer than 1,000 vehicles a day. Other roads with more traffic got 24-hour treatment if needed.

It’s not that minor roads were left unplowed entirely. They were cleared during the day, but not overnight. And this has been CDOT policy since at least the 1980s. What happened was that in December last year, in an effort to be helpful to the travelling public, it decided to start posting signs on those stretches of roads alerting drivers to the plowing hours.

Click here for an interactive map showing all of the roads impacted by the limited plowing hours.

This apparently caused many folks to mistakenly think this was a brand new policy, another cutback by Gov. Bill Ritter and an ill-advised safety problem, when in fact rural drivers have been living with this practice for as long as anyone can remember.

As usual, there is more nuance here and less controversy than the sound bites would have you believe.

The only thing that was new about it was the signs letting you know about it.

Well, actually a few other things are new too. While a few maintenance sections around the state hadn’t been adhering to the policy and sometimes did work overnight on minor roads, the change last year required them to stick to it. But the Colorado Transportation Commission also added some exceptions that will allow overnight plowing on minor roads if they serve medical facilities or schools – things that weren’t provided for in the old version of the policy. Minor roads now also can be plowed overnight if there’s a danger that too much snow will result in their closure.

And CDOT regional directors can issue waivers to allow the additional hours of overnight plowing on segments of minor roads that have accident rates higher than the state average for similar roads.

So actually, the new policy could result in more plowing of minor roads than before.

Click here to read the policy update that was passed last year.

Click here to read CDOT’s response to the legislature’s joint Budget Committee last month when lawmakers asked about the policy. The issue is discussed on Page 2, at question 3.

But the desire to be more informative has led to a huge amount of misinformation – purposeful or unintentional – about this long-standing policy.

And some politicians are milking the issue for their constituents. Ironically, many are the same ones who early this year voted against a bill that increased CDOT funding.

In other words, they are urging CDOT to add a new state service that hasn’t been provided for three decades or longer while having voting against the first new money for state highway maintenance and repair in 18 years. That measure, the FASTER bill for replacing unsafe bridges and roads, passed anyway.

This is politics, plain and simple.

In fact, CDOT this year has increased its snow and ice control budget to $63.9 million to raise the level of service, the only maintenance category to increase this year.

The policy of limiting overnight plowing makes sense. With limited resources available to it, CDOT has to put the effort where it matters the most. Consider that Interstate 70 carries nearly 12,000 vehicles a day out east toward Kansas past Flagler, Siebert and Stratton. Interstate 25 toward Wyoming handles about 18,000 a day. I-25 over frequently closed Monument Hill has average daily traffic demand of more than 50,000 vehicles a day. These are vital transportation corridors, important to our state’s commerce and quality of life.

When a storm threatens to close these major highways, priorities have to be established especially when money is tight. It makes no practical sense to take away overnight crews from them – remember, we’re only talking here about the hours between 7 p.m. and 5 a.m. – to have them work overnight on CO 10 through Cuchara Junction – 630 vehicles a day – or CO 193 in Fort Lyon at 320 vehicles a day.

Looking north along I-25 where I-225 splits off to the right. CDOT photo.

Roadgeeks like to name things.

Today we’re going to try to hang a name on something.

Usually, we like the technical names. We like to talk about “collector-distributor lanes,” the barrier-separated lanes that run alongside the through-lanes at freeway interchanges to allow exiting and entering traffic to merge and weave safely off the high-speed freeway. They’re used in the Narrows section of Interstate 25 between Washington Street and University Boulevard. My wife, Harriet, calls them “hunter-gatherer” lanes, perhaps a more picturesque description.

In that spirit, I’m proposing that we give a household name to the recently rebuilt and expanded interchange in the Denver Tech Center where Interstate 225 dumps into Interstate 25.

I want to call it the Full House. That’s the name that fellow roadgeek Duncan Shaw, a news producer at CBS4 Denver, proposed for it in 2001.

It works on two levels. One, if you were holding a poker hand with three twos and two fives, you’d have a full house. Two, the interchange handles more than 200,000 vehicles a day, making it one of the fullest places on the regional roadway system.

View Larger Map

We’ve got one of the unique names in the nation as far as interchanges go, with the Mousetrap at I-25 and Interstate 70 in the Globeville neighborhood. Technically, it’s a variation on what’s known as a Turbine Interchange, with sweeping circular ramps making the connections. Mind you, I don’t want to get into the middle of the debate over whether retired traffic reporter Don Martin or longtime Channel 7 television reporter Bill Clarke coined the Mousetrap term. But everyone knows it as the Mousetrap; they don’t say “You go north on I-25 and exit at I-70,” they say, “Take I-25 to the Mousetrap.”

So it’s time we stopped saying “Go down I-25 to that Semi-Directional T interchange at I-225 and head north.”

It’s time to play the Full House.

Headed from southbound I-225 to southbound I-25, under light rail bridges, in the Full House interchange. Photo by Ryan Wanner, of Ryan's Digital Roadgeekdom at http://r-dub.us/

Duncan says he threw out that name in 2001 during an online discussion on usenet.

“I first proposed the name ‘Full House’ for Denver’s I-25/I-225 interchange in the misc.transport.road newsgroup back in 2001 during a thread on interchange names where people were suggesting some for ones that didn’t have regularly-used names.

“I felt it was both a creative and unique name. You’ll find ‘spaghetti bowls’ and ‘mixmasters’ all over the country that could describe any number of interchanges. But I can only find 21 in the United States where both the same pattern exists as I-25/I-225 and the numbers could make up a legitimate full house hand.”

(Let’s pause here to appreciate the level of roadgeekery it takes to scour the nation’s highway system for all of the places where the potential exists to have two- and three-digit interstates meet that contain three of one number and two of another number.)

“For instance, I-10/I-110 would not count since there are no 1’s and 0’s in playing cards.”

Here is a link to a list of highway interchange nicknames from around the country.

And here is a link to a glossary and diagrams of various types of freeway interchanges.

The old interchange, before T-REX's extreme makeover highway edition, had hazardous left-lane access ramps.

The old Tech Center interchange had been build with a left-lane exit and entrance onto I-25 from I-225, which led to hazardous merging as traffic congestion grew over the years. Contractors Parsons Transportation Group and Kiewit, which teamed for the design-build project, redesigned this interchange while threading the light rail bridges through it as well.

In 2003, in my Lane Ranger column in the Rocky Mountain News, I solicited interchange names from readers, and Duncan’s name was, in my opinion, the best. I used it in my coverage whenever I could slip it past my editor. Matt Salek, a transportation engineer who maintains the Highways of Colorado web site with stats and data on every state highway, included the name on his site.

Duncan says that when he was a morning news producer at 9News working with traffic reporters Al Verlay and Tony LaMonica, he tried to dell them on the name as well, with little success.

But we can’t say that it caught on back then.

“At this point, I figure it will only be known – and remembered – by a limited number of people in the roadgeek community, and that’s fine with me,” Duncan said. “But it would have been nice to turn on the radio during rush hour, hear someone use the name I came up with during a traffic report, and know that drivers knew exactly where it was!”

So we already have the Mousetrap; Orange County, Calif., has the Orange Crush interchange; Chicago has the Hillside Strangler; Dallas has the High Five.

It’s time for people to start using the name Full House!

An RTD light rail train heads through the Full House interchange while highway traffic passes underneath.

Why would a group of especially devoted and knowledgeable rail advocates bring a legal action against the redevelopment plan for Denver Union Station? In a word: Violations. It violates good principles of transportation, it violates the Vision Statement of the plan, it violates fiscal prudence, it violates the historical character and protection of the station, and it violates the trust of the voters who taxed themselves for an efficient rail system for their future mobility requirements.

1) Good principles of transportation demand that passenger convenience and operating efficiency preside over all other considerations, especially when the public is picking up the tab. Good principles include the “one-seat-ride,” which negates a change in modes between origin and destination. Another is close-proximity connections, when they are unavoidable, saving time and trouble, and providing ultimate convenience. Another good principle provides for through-operation of transit modes at the central hub, which minimizes dwell time at the hub station, saving valuable space and adding capacity simultaneously.

The DUS plan ignores through-operation of light rail, heavy rail, and bus, negating the possibility of any one-seat-rides beyond DUS. The plan pulls apart the already paid-for current close proximity of light and heavy rail by two blocks or more, robbing the transit patron of time and convenience. And robbing the system of potential riders: An established transit axiom suggests up to half of potential riders will decline to use the service if a transfer is involved. The quality of the connection will determine patron participation, such as the time, distance, and convenience required to change transit modes.

Through-operation could be accomplished by extending the existing “tail tracks” to rejoin the mainline railroad tracks from which they were severed many years ago, when the city reconfigured Speer Boulevard. The tail tracks are the existing extensions of 5 station tracks that terminate at Cherry Creek along Wewatta Street. But planners believe it is more important to place a building where those tracks to the future are located, and more important to accommodate automobiles in the crucible of the rail spine in what was supposed to be a transportation project. While the tail tracks pertain to heavy rail, light rail could have been better positioned for future extensions as well, such as to Coors Field and beyond.

Adequate station capacity is yet another good principle. With the proposed DUS plan, capacity is limited, since all trains must reverse direction at the “stub end,” requiring time and taking up platform space. The same is true of the planned underground bus facility, which must accommodate layovers. It is a bus stop and a storage facility, requiring a larger footprint than a simple loading/unloading accommodation. These types of activities waste precious and expensive on-site space, and they are a direct result of not providing for through-operations of all transit modes.

Adequate station capacity should be a paramount concern in order to accommodate rail and transit services that are certain to become reality. DUS will open largely at capacity, hampering efforts to host future services. This is terribly shortsighted.

2) The DUS Vision Statement and Master Plan implied a number of seemingly benevolent components. One by one they have been diminished or eliminated:

“Better connectivity between transit modes.”
• Many will be worse (light rail/commuter rail).
• Others come with a hefty price tag (taxpayer-funded mall shuttle extension).
• Bus/rail connections will vary in two-block-long underground bus facility; worse than present.
• Greater distances between connecting transit vehicles will have a disproportionate adverse impact on the disabled community.

“Provide for interstate & intercity bus operations and their connections.”
• Hub for those services eliminated; reduced to two bus bays.

“Unite critical elements of the local, regional, statewide, and national transportation systems, both public and private, existing and planned (emphasis added).”
• There will be little room for additional services in any category, it opens almost to capacity.
• Existing accommodations for excursion trains and private rail cars virtually nonexistent.

“Amtrak equipment requires more land and construction”
• About 25 percent of DUS site, which could accommodate above services and capacity, will be sold to the developer for the placement of buildings rather than rails.
• Planners’ claims that expansion can occur at mainline railroad tracks three blocks from the station are likely uncertain and inadequate, and further “balkanize” (Amtrak’s word) rail services, resulting in great inefficiency and inconvenience for patrons and service providers.

“Transform … DUS into a multimodal transportation hub of international significance, and a prominent and distinctive gateway to downtown Denver and the region.”
• Multimodal? By removing and diminishing modes?
• International significance? Highly unlikely, with a buried bus station as the focal point.

“Prominent and distinctive gateway.”
• Adjacent to a three-track freight railroad saturated with 110-car coal trains hauled by massive diesel locomotives, or entering a bus hole?

“Offer the region’s citizens many more transportation options, all in one place (emphasis added).”
• Transportation options are NOT in one place; they are scattered about the developer’s other land holdings, suggesting alternate agendas.
• The “place” has been expanded by 13 acres, separating transit modes by as much as three blocks.

“Denver Union Station will create an exciting transportation crossroads … respecting the character and historical significance of this handsome station.”
• Most transit patrons will have no reason to visit the station since they will arrive and depart blocks away on extended shuttles.
• Respect character by placing large buildings directly next to the station, hiding it from many sightlines and plunging the revered plazas in shadow much of the time?
• Respect character by demolishing existing, functional, and already-paid-for historic pedestrian tunnel that links all tracks to historic station? What historical significance is honored in this manner?

3) Fiscal prudence is not apparent in the DUS plan. Much existing infrastructure will be destroyed when it could have been modified and expanded to host the FasTracks corridors and all existing and future users.

And there will be significant operating costs in perpetuity: Extended mall shuttles (buses, drivers, maintenance, fuel) and extensive ventilation and pumping, due to the water table, at the underground bus facility.

Plus, there will undoubtedly be costs to accommodate future services, already being studied, that will not find space at DUS because there will be buildings occupying the ground where their rails could have been.

This elaborate plan also includes a massive roof that sports a massive opening, exposing all those below to all the elements that Colorado has to offer. It is gratuitous, out of place, functionless and costly.

Then there is the ruthless excavation of the entire site by some four feet to implement the more costly “high-level” train platforms. This time-consuming and expensive exercise is not necessary, other than to address aesthetics. The high-level platforms result from RTD’s most curious decision to select single-level railcars, in total contrast to almost every other new and existing commuter rail line in the nation. In further contradiction to practices elsewhere, it is important to note that a dozen or more municipal transit systems have spent millions to bring light rail into close proximity with its heavy rail counterpart for passenger convenience, just as Denver did some eight years ago, but which Denver will now pay even more to remove, wasting the original expenditure.

Of course, during this excavation adventure, current users of DUS (Amtrak, Ski Train, etc.) will need “temporary” alternate housing for three to four, costing millions more. This inconvenience likely could be avoided by incrementally adjusting current track and platform configurations on the current grade, as needed.

Finally, how will the current downturn in commercial real estate jeopardize the financing scheme for the DUS plan? Could that be why Standard & Poor’s declined to give the proposed DUS bonds a rating? Is there really a market for all of the proposed development near DUS? If existing businesses relocate to DUS will that cause problematic vacancies elsewhere? Would it be more prudent to separate the transit components from the private development and just build the more modest transportation hub with the already dedicated funds from the FasTracks revenue stream?

Rendering shows the commuter rail boarding platforms planned for behind Denver Union Station' the light rail platforms are proposed to be being relocated north of here, near the existing freight tracks.

(4) The historic character of DUS will be permanently tarnished with the presence of the proposed side-flanking buildings. They will hide and detract from the historic architecture of the station building and plunge much of the plaza area and neighborhood in shadow. The currently in-use and historically designated pedestrian tunnel linking the tracks to the station will be destroyed. The DUS plan violates the historic nature of the site and its facilities.

(5) In 2004, area voters convincingly approved RTD’s FasTracks plan that would add numerous rail corridors to the existing transit system. Denver Union Station was designated to be the central hub of all of these corridors even before FasTracks became reality. There was even a reference to “NexTracks,” suggesting further corridor additions.

But voter trust has been violated because DUS transportation elements have been manipulated and compromised to favor real estate development and auto mobility, as described in the preceding paragraphs. The four government entities that purchased DUS in 2001 surrendered their transportation obligations and responsibilities to a prominent real estate development consortium which owns adjoining land parcels ripe for financial exploitation. As such, it appears that only the public transit components have become malleable, morphing from all underground locations to scattered locations. Streets and buildings seem to have escaped such manipulation, perhaps sacrosanct, even though the transit election enabled this ambitious project to proceed.

It is understandable that land-locked Denver must develop within its set boundaries. Development of its downtown core offers tantalizing opportunities to showcase a great municipality. The promise of multiple transit corridors penetrating that core only ratchets up the opportunities. And it is further appropriate for the private sector development to profit and share the prosperity and greatness. But it is not appropriate to take advantage of the taxpayers’ generosity and shortchange their transportation opportunities for the future.

It should be further noted that FasTracks and DUS belong to the eight-county region that enabled the monumental transit project, designed to benefit all communities. DUS is not solely in Denver’s domain and it is unfortunate that Denver has disproportionate influence on the board of the governing agency for the project.

There are many compelling reasons to assure success of FasTracks and its vital DUS component, both locally and in the wider realm. Air pollution and ozone figure prominently in the population’s health, aggravated by congested roadways, their limits and inefficiencies, especially during bad weather. Our population, which is both aging and growing, creates new mobility challenges. Air transportation conundrums abound, and flights of 500 miles or less make less sense than rail corridors of similar length. And, of course, the uncertainty of oil pricing and availability confounds the world economy. The DUS plan fails to fulfill its optimum potential to address these many critical transportation vulnerabilities.

Efficient mobility is essential to economic vitality. The plan for DUS falls short of that efficiency. As residents and government officials twist in the wind over FasTracks’ significant budget shortfalls, there is a parallel twisting in the DUS financing. Yet there are equitable solutions to the DUS financing fragility. The entire Union Station neighborhood needs a re-examination. Transit services must be viewed through the eyes of the potential rider and the neighborhood mobility must be viewed through the eyes of the pedestrian. That is what Transit Oriented Development is all about. Denver has a unique, one-time opportunity to make a statement about how it views its sustainable future. Transportation must rule this unique neighborhood as it once again serves as the foundation of a greater Denver, region, and state.

And that is why the Colorado Rail Passenger Association has taken legal action against the prevailing plan for Denver Union Station. The easy-to-read lawsuit can be viewed by clicking on this link to www.colorail.org.

Most importantly, the legislation does not address a looming $8.7 billion rescission of existing contract authority (enacted in the 2005 transportation law known as SAFETEA-LU and amended by a 2007 energy law), which will be executed next week by the Federal Highway Administration if not repealed. Oberstar did not discuss the rescission issue on the House floor, but his spokesman said a repeal of the rescission was left out of the measure because House rules would require an offset to pay for it through higher taxes or reduced spending elsewhere.

The rescission issue is a very real problem for the state departments of transportation as they will be negatively impacted in a total of $8.7 billion.

“This rescission will amount to real dollar losses to programs and projects, and will have a devastating effect on many state departments of transportation and reverse the positive economic gains brought about by the recovery act,” John Horsley, executive director of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials. “Colorado would lose $115 million in contract authority.”

Read the entire item at Reason Foundation.

Tony Milo

That $500 million annual buildup, however, disguises the full magnitude of the “quiet crisis” Coloradans now confront.

If we intend to significantly reduce traffic congestion, establish better connections between regions within the state, improve local roads and strategically expand transit options, Coloradans need to invest three times that amount – a conservatively estimated $1.5 billion – in new, annually dedicated, inflation adjusted revenue.

On behalf of the Colorado Contractors Association (CCA), our 400 construction, equipment, goods and service provider companies, and the over 30,000 workers CCA members collectively employ, I invite you to join the men and women of CCA in consciously choosing a path to enhance the quality of life and economic vitality for all Coloradans.

Colorado legislators and Governor Ritter a few months ago approved Colorado Senate Bill 09-108 – dubbed the FASTER bill. FASTER creates weight-based Bridge Safety and Road Safety fees and a $2.00 daily car rental fee. Because over 80% of all vehicles registered in Colorado weigh less than 5,000 pounds, most Coloradans will pay $41 more per vehicle, per year (about $3.42 a month) on their vehicle registration bill.

The Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) projects that, when fully implemented, FASTER will generate about $250 million per year to help:

• save, restore and create Colorado jobs and jumpstart our State economy;
• accelerate repair/construction of Colorado’s most urgent bridge and road safety/maintenance priorities;
• invest in Colorado’s most urgent transit infrastructure priorities; and
• reduce Colorado’s $1.5 billion annual transportation infrastructure funding shortfall.

Colorado legislators and Governor Ritter demonstrated responsible, courageous and necessary leadership in supporting FASTER. They knew voting to approve FASTER’s fee increase would be difficult and unpopular. Nevertheless, they recognized that without prompt action, the cost to begin addressing Colorado’s infrastructure problems would exponentially increase in future years. Consequently, they made the tough, but necessary, decision to lead.

Colorado’s existing gas tax revenues generate a fraction of the dollars required to maintain – much less expand – Colorado’s network of roads, bridges, interchanges and tunnels.

FASTER makes Colorado’s road and bridges safer and ensures fewer Colorado workers and their families will face unemployment, home foreclosure and loss of healthcare insurance.

Please consider the following facts, which I believe led Governor Ritter and legislators to approve FASTER.

• Colorado taxpayers today own 128 structurally deficient, functionally obsolete, poorly rated bridges.

• 40% of our roads are in poor condition and 20% require complete reconstruction.

• Once a road deteriorates to the point where we must reconstruct it, taxpayers pay literally 7 times more then they otherwise would, had we completed the necessary preventive and deferred maintenance in a timely manner.

• Fuel taxes comprise 95% of Colorado’s bridge, highway, interchange and tunnel funding.

• Colorado last raised its fuel tax in 1991.

• The federal government last raised its fuel tax in 1993.

• Nineteen years of inflation (see Colorado Construction Cost Index) has eroded the purchasing power of State fuel tax revenues to the point that Colorado’s fuel tax dollar buys 60% less in transportation infrastructure improvements today than that same dollar bought in 1991.

• Colorado’s State Demographer projects Colorado’s population will grow by 2.6 million people in the next 25 years.

• The national economic downturn hit Colorado’s construction industry especially hard. Many civil construction companies and their equipment, goods and service suppliers have laid off between 20% and 40% of their respective workforces in the last 18 to 24 months. (The federal stimulus money is only now beginning to have its intended effect.)

I believe legislators and Governor Ritter acted reasonably and responsibly in approving the fee increase. Had they failed to approve FASTER, they would have been criticized for doing nothing – and rightly so.

While FASTER represents an important step forward, when fully implemented in three years, FASTER fee increase will annually generate about $250 million for road and bridge maintenance and transit infrastructure. In inflation adjusted terms, that equals 1/6th of Colorado’s annual $1.5 billion need.

I hope Coloradans recognize that in paying FASTER’s fee increase, we save a neighbor’s job and take a modest, but vital, step toward stabilizing Colorado’s deteriorating infrastructure and economy.

Looking beyond FASTER, what’s next? What do Coloradans believe are the wisest ways to save, restore and create jobs, safeguard road safety and enhance our collective quality of life?

How do we intend to pay for the CDOT services on which so many rely – and so many take for granted? Mountain pass snow removal, rock fall mitigation, right-of-way weed mowing and litter clean-up, highway resurfacing and de-icing/sanding are but a few of the public services CDOT provides.

I invite all Coloradans to engage state and local leaders in a candid, statewide, problem-solving dialog about not “if,” but “how,” we value our public infrastructure and collective quality of life and future.

Even with FASTER, short of substantial new, annually dedicated, inflation adjusted funding, Colorado’s transportation infrastructure will continue to deteriorate at the rate of at least $500 million per year. Failure to address that deferred maintenance backlog soon will compromise road safety, undermine Colorado’s competitive edge in the region and cost Colorado’s taxpayers, transportation system users and economy more in future years.

So, the next time you have an opportunity, thank Governor Ritter, legislators and your local County Commissioners, Mayors and City Council members for their collective courage and responsible leadership on the FASTER bill.

Then, ask them to look forward and share with you their respective $500 million to $1.5 billion transportation infrastructure solutions.

What’s your proposed $500 million to $1.5 billion transportation infrastructure solution?

Let the problem-solving discussions begin.
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Tony Milo is Executive Director of the Colorado Contractors Association (CCA), which represents approximately 400 civil construction companies and associated equipment, goods and service providers whom collectively employ over 30,000 employees throughout the state. Tony lives in Parker, Colorado and is the proud father of two teenagers.

When RTD closed out the books last week on its half of the T-REX multimodal expansion along Interstates 25 and 225, it finished with $3.7 million left over out of its $879 million share of the $1.67 billion budget it split with the Colorado Department of Transportation.

Since the project was finished 22 months earlier than the original schedule, this forms the basis for RTD’s claim that the Southeast Corridor, which extended light rail from Broadway Station to Lincoln Avenue in Douglas County and Parker Road in Aurora, was completed under budget and ahead of schedule.

CDOT makes the same claim for its highway portion of the project, which added lanes to both freeways, reconfigured the “Full House” interchange of I-25/225, added Intelligent Transportation Systems for better traffic management, replaced all of the out-of-date bridges and fixed the drainage problem that caused storm flooding under the Logan Street overpass. CDOT finished $8 million under its $790 million budget.

Skeptics cry foul. They point out that the Major Investment Study on the Southeast Corridor, completed in 1997, said the light rail project would cost $445 million. They want you to think RTD went double over its budget.

The skeptics are either uninformed or deliberately misleading you. The project indeed came in under budget, for both RTD and CDOT.

The $445 million projected cost of the southeast corridor light rail outlined in the 1997 MIS was not a budget. As it states specifically in the document, it is in 1995 dollars. Patient drivers will recall that the project was built between 2001 and 2006.

It is intellectually dishonest to portray the estimated costs in an initial study document as some sort of final budget, because the costs are stated in constant dollars – what it would cost if it could all be built right then and there. That’s because no one knows in the beginning when, or whether, the project can be built so it’s impossible to set up an actual budget. You simply don’t know in what year you’ll have to buy the steel or concrete or labor. All you can do is quantify how much of each item you think you’ll need, and state its cost at the time.

In this case, it’s even worse. The 1997 MIS stated costs in 1995 dollars.

Projects are not paid for in “constant dollars,” they are paid for in “year-of-expenditure dollars.” They are not the same thing. When it’s time to make an actual budget, estimators take the unit quantities for each piece of work, determine in what year it is needed and then estimate inflation trends to come up with an actual “year of expenditure” cost.

In the case of T-REX, trying to compare the estimate of light rail cost when it was stated in 1995 dollars to the budget for when it actually would be built between 2001 and 2006 is, simply, bad math.

Skeptics are feeding you an apple and claiming it’s an orange.

One other factor makes the comparison with the early figure bogus.

The MIS outlined a different project. The Southeast Corridor light rail plan in 1997 had only 10 stations in the first phase; the T-REX project advanced the Yale, Orchard and Dayton stations from a later phase and incorporated them into the opening day plan.

But the biggest difference between the 1997 MIS and the 1999 EIS wasn’t with RTD, it was with CDOT.

When Bill Owens became governor in 1999, he ordered up a new look at the highway improvements that the MIS outlined for I-25 and 225. Because CDOT hadn’t been able to identify any source of money to do a full blown widening of the freeways, the 1997 study had no added through lanes at all. It consisted only of some shoulder widening for breakdown and emergency access, auxiliary lanes between the ramps between Arapahoe and Orchard roads, the braided ramp separating traffic entering northbound at Belleview Avenue from the traffic exiting onto I-225, and the drainage work at Logan.

Total cost of the highway work in the MIS was only $57 million.

But Owens had a plan to get the money CDOT needed to widen I-25. In November 1999, the state put the TRANS Bonds measure on the ballot to ask voters statewide for borrowing authority to issue up to $1.7 billion in bonds to accelerate work on up to 28 vital transportation corridors around the state, with the lion’s share of the money earmarked for T-REX.

The measure won, and CDOT was able to join RTD in a much larger project that added four full lanes south of Belleview and two lanes north of there and along I-225. It added to overall right-of-way costs for the wider building envelope.

So since CDOT’s budget ended up at $790 million, would critics say the costs ballooned 14-fold? Well, maybe they would, but they’d be wrong. The scope of work is what ballooned, and rightly so given the much safer and congestion-free segment of highway that resulted.

Now, it doesn’t matter to me whether you’re going to be for or against a highway project or a transit line. What does matter is being straight about it either way.

In RTD’s case, at the end of the environmental impact study, the projected cost of the light rail project was $879 million. And that’s where it ended up – minus $3.7 million.