Ft.Collins/Loveland Airport Manager Named CDOT Aeronautics Division Director

David Gordon, manager of the Ft. Collins/Loveland Municipal Airport, has been named Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) Aeronautics Division Director. His appointment is effective April 9.

Gordon has worked in the aviation sector for the past 35 years. He served for 24 years as manager of the Jefferson County Airport in Broomfield, and since 2002 he has been manager at the Loveland/Ft. Collins airport.

Gordon is very familiar with the CDOT Division of Aeronautics and its many programs. He was appointed by Colorado Governor Roy Romer to the Colorado Aeronautical Board, which oversees the CDOT Aeronautics Division, where he served from 1996-1999. He was a founding director and served on the Board of Directors of the Colorado Airport Operators Association.

In his new position, Gordon will manage seven CDOT staff members who work directly with Colorado public-use airports as well as Colorado and national aviation associations to help improve aviation safety and operations.

The CDOT Aeronautics Division also oversees an annual discretionary grants program that awards revenues from aviation fuel sales taxes to Colorado public use airports for infrastructure, safety, and programmatic improvements. The most recent round of these grants, announced in February, 2010, awarded $5.7 million for nearly 50 Colorado airport projects. The funds were used to leverage local and federal funding for a total value of nearly $96 million.

Aerial view shows the Northwest Rail corridor looking southwest from Twin Peaks Mall in Longmont to Boulder. Courtesy RTD.

By Kevin Flynn
Inside-Lane.com

The FasTracks Northwest Rail corridor could get a head start under a plan that would build its first six and a half miles, between Denver Union Station and south Westminster at 72nd and Lowell Boulevard, as part of the construction of lines to the airport and Arvada.

That will give RTD the capability of initiating rail transit service to southwest Adams County and Westminster sooner rather than later.

Northwest Rail, FasTracks’ longest and costliest-per-rider rail corridor, is one of four new rail corridors in the program that is facing the possibility of significant delay because of the economic crisis that has drained the FasTracks budget.

But RTD’s efforts at privatizing the next two corridors – East Corridor to Denver International Airport and the Gold Line to Arvada-Wheat Ridge – to help close that $2.45 billion budget gap includes a component that would extend the Northwest Rail as an electrified heavy-rail commuter corridor up into southwest Adams County.

The 'Town Center' theme for Northwest Rail stations is one of several design options outlined in the environmental study. RTD rendering.

The $665.2 million, 41-mile Northwest Rail corridor goes between downtown Denver and Longmont along the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway line that passes through Westminster, Broomfield, Louisville and Boulder. Northwest of 72nd and Lowell, RTD plans to operate jointly with BNSF freight trains – although they would run at different times – along a new double track section all the way to Longmont.

RTD simulation shows the larger heavy-rail electric commuter rail cars along Grandview Avenue in Arvada. Different than light rail cars, these are proposed for use on the Gold Line and East Corridor.

Self-propelled diesel-powered passeneger cars such as this would be used on the full Northwest Rail corridor. Courtesy RTD.

This phasing, along with other details of the Northwest Rail project, are up for public meetings tonight and next week as part of the environmental study process all FasTracks corridors have gone through.

You can read through the environmental documents here.

The first public meeting on the Northwest Rail Environmental Evaluation is set for tonight in the Longmont Civic Center, 350 Kimbark St. Using an open house format in which you can go from station to station and get your questions answered individually, the public can attend any time between 6 and 8:30 p.m.

However, 6:30 to 7:30, there will be a more formal presentation by RTD’s project manager for Northwest Rail, Chris Quinn, followed by a question and answer session

The meetings next week will be at the same times on Wednesday, March 17, in the Louisville Middle School, 1341 Main St., and Thursday, March 18, in Hodgkins Elementary School, 3475 West 67th Ave., Adams County.

RTD rendering shows the site plan for the Westminster Station on Northwest Rail, which would be on the end of the first phase segment.

The Eagle P3 project is an innovative approach to delivering the transit corridors in a challenging economic environment. The East Corridor will serve Denver International Airport through northeast Denver and Aurora, and the Gold Line serves Arvada and Wheat Ridge, all from Union Station. By selecting a concessionaire to finance, develop and operate those corridors, RTD is able to spread out its payments over the 40-year life of the contract and lower the amount of capital it needs upfront to complete FasTracks.

It takes the design-build project delivery process used successfully in the T-REX project a few steps further by also including privatization of upfront financing and back-end operations and maintenance. RTD would maintain control of such things as schedule, fares, maintenance standards and such through the master concession agreement. On a smaller scale, RTD already privatizes about half of its existing bus service in the same way.

Northwest Rail is Unique in FasTracks in that it is the only corridor that would share the same tracks with operating freight trains. As such, RTD and BNSF need to come up with a formal operating agreement that would make BNSF the contractor for the improvements to its own tracks.

Eagle P3 already gives Northwest Rail a leg up because the concessionaire would build the Gold Line tracks and shared stations on the Gold Line out of Union Station to Pecos Junction at 61st and Pecos. From there, it is only another two and a quarter miles to where the electrified portion of Northwest Rail would end, around Bradburn Boulevard and 72nd Avenue.

The corridor is planned to have 11 stations along its own exclusive alignment. In addition, it shares two stations – at 41st Avenue and Fox Street in north Denver and at 61st Avenue and Pecos Street in southwest Adams County – with the Gold Line.

FasTracks-funded stations include the south Westminster station at 72nd and Lowell, Walnut Creek in Westminster, Flatiron in Broomfield, Downtown Louisville, Boulder Transit Village, Gunbarrel and Downtown Longmont.

Four other proposed stations are not funded under FasTracks, but would need to be funded by third parties. They are Westminster/88th Avenue, Broomfield/116th Avenue, East Boulder and Twin Peaks in Longmont.

Here is a map showing the entire Northwest Rail Corridor:

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.

Cut-away view shows the underground bus station below 17th Street with the covered access to street level. Union Station Neighborhood Co. rendering.

By Kevin Flynn
Inside-Lane.com

A divided RTD board committee has given preliminary approval to removing a set of planned moving walkways from the design of the FasTracks transfer facility at Denver Union Station, a controversial element that has divided transit advocates and helped spawn a lawsuit.

By a 7-5 vote, members of the FasTracks Monitoring Committee – where the elected board typically gets its first look at FasTracks issues – approved a recommendation to delete the pair of moving sidewalks from the design. They had been proposed to cover 217 feet of the total distance of about 850 feet that will separate the new light rail and heavy rail passenger platforms.

The board still must consider final approval next week. With three members absent for the committee vote this week, one more member still must cast a “yes” vote to approve the change, assuming all 15 are present.

The heavy-rail commuter platform was originally planned to be adjacent to where the current light rail platform is located. Under a proposal from the developer, Union Station Neighborhood Co., in 2006, the commuter rail will stay there but the light rail will be relocated north two and a half blocks near the freight tracks and Millennium Bridge, with a new underground bus transfer facility as part of the multimodal station, replacing Market Street Station on the 16th Street Mall.

The underground bus station would double as a connector between the two rail modes, and the mall shuttle system will be extended to reach down to the new light rail platform.

The moving sidewalks were originally a concession to passengers, such as airport-bound families toting luggage, who would have to cover the distance between rail platforms.

But refined design of the 22-bay underground bus facility narrowed the width of the space so that a bus staging lane could be added underground. That made the walkways an impediment rather than a help to pedestrians, according to a report to the board by Rick Clarke, FasTracks’ acting manager for engineering.

That didn’t stop five board members from voting no, however, in a rare display of division over FasTracks among the board.

“The reason I voted for the amended master plan (several years ago) was because of the moving sidewalk,” said board member Bill Christopher. “Just fundamentally, when we moved the light rail station out, we got the moving sidewalk. But now, we have the moving sidewalk out but the light rail station is still out there.”

Rendering shows passengers headed toward commuter trains from behind Union Station. Courtesy Union Station Neighborhood Co.

Christopher voted against taking out the moving walks, along with members Matt Cohen, John Tayer, Jack O’Boyle and Wally Pulliam. Those voting in favor were Bill James, Bruce Daly, Noel Busck, Lee Kemp, Chris Martinez, Kent Bagley and Tom Tobiassen.

“One of the things I was able to tell people who were concerned about the distance between the light rail and commuter rail was that at least we were having a moving sidewalk,” Tayer said.

“We’re doing this at the expense of providing our passengers a convenient way of getting from light rail to commuter rail,” said Pulliam, who went on later in the meeting to vote against advancing $9 million from FasTracks to the developer to get construction underway in advance of receiving federal loans for the project this spring.

Pulliam wanted RTD to go with an alternative that would widen the pedestrian area within the bus station by deleting the six-bus staging lane on the west side of the underground facility. That would bring an additional 11 feet of width to the pedestrian area.

But Clarke said the staging area is essential and RTD would have difficulty finding such an area above-ground nearby in the lower downtown neighborhood, where people object to idling buses.

The move saves the $480 million project the $2 million cost of the mechanisms, known in the industry as “travelators.” It also removes $25,000 a year in anticipated operating and maintenance costs for them.

The irony is that many who advocate the moving walkways would rather not have them at all – they have been urging RTD not to relocate the light rail platform at all, but to keep it where it is and make it adjacent to the new commuter rail boarding area.

The design is part of a lawsuit filed by transit-advocate ColoRail, which says the inconvenience of the transfer will hurt ridership. RTD maintains the level of projected ridership transfers between light rail and heavy rail is small enough to minimize the problem. The transit agency also says it is too late to engage in the substantial redesign without imperiling the already tight schedule.

The transit improvements at Union Station must be completed by 2014 in time for FasTracks’ West Corridor light rail, currently under construction, to terminate there and for the imminent start of construction on the heavy-rail East Corridor line to Denver International Airport.

Other FasTracks corridors planned to terminate at Union Station are the Gold Line from Arvada-Wheat Ridge, Northwest Rail from Longmont, Boulder, Broomfield and Westminster, North Metro from Thornton and Commerce City, and the C and E light rail lines of the existing Southwest and Southeast Corridors from Littleton and Douglas County.

One of the two steel truss bridges carrying US 50 over the Gunnison River in Gunnison that is on CDOT's wish list to repair with federal funds next year. CDOT photo.

By Kevin Flynn
Inside-Lane.com

The Colorado Department of Transportation has put 40 highway and airport projects totaling $136.8 million on its wish list for federal grants in 2011.

Each year, the U.S. Department of Transportation awards what it calls discretionary grants, over and above each state’s usual formula funding, in targeted areas such as bridge repair, interstate maintenance, scenic byways and others.

There are 31 highway projects on the list, totaling $90.3 million, and nine airport projects totaling $46.5 million. You can read the entire CDOT list here.

Because it focuses on specific needs, discretionary funding can quickly be put to good use – a series of such grants was used by CDOT to replace the old Interstate 25 viaduct over Broadway and the railroad mainline at the same time T-REX was under construction, allowing both new projects to open at the same time and effectively making the T-REX improvements go a little bit farther.

The federal government sets up funding in various categories and then solicits candidate projects from the states. Projects are selected based on how well they fit the criteria for each category.

This US 24 bridge over California Gulch three miles south of Leadville, built in 1934, is one of those up for replacement if CDOT wins a federal discretionary grant it is seeking for next year. CDOT photo.

Other requests include $6.6 million to replace the Sixth Avenue Freeway bridge over Sheridan Boulevard, on the Denver-Lakewood line; $5.5 million for four miles of concrete resurfacing on Interstate 70 in Glenwood Canyon; $5 million to reconstruct I-70 in concrete from Tower Road to Colfax Avenue, and $4 million to replace the CO 120 span over the Arkansas River and Union Pacific Railroad in Fremont County.

The Sixth Avenue bridge and the CO 120 bridge are two of the 124 poor-rated bridges in the state that are part of the FASTER program. Drivers are being charged an average of up to $18 a year extra on their vehicle registrations to replace poor-rated bridges under the law passed last year. The Sixth Avenue span was built in 1961 and is rated 45.1 on a scale of 100 as structurally deficient. The Fremont County bridge is a steel truss structure built in 1927 and is rated 17.9 for being functionally obsolete.

You can take a photo tour of the 124 bridges on a map of the state by clicking here.

Among the airport projects for which funds are being requested are $13 million to extend the runway at Aspen’s Sardy Field; $7 million for a wildlife fence at Walker Field in Grand Junction; $7 million for an apron extension at Denver International Airport; $5 million for taxiway rehabilitation at Colorado Springs Municipal Airport, and $4 million for runway rehabilitation at Front Range Airport.

While CDOT isn’t likely to get all it asks for, it will enlist the help of the state’s congressional delegation to push for them.

There’s reason for that.

CDOT says the projects are a priority that “address pressing needs of the state transportation system.” They are already on the Statewide Transportation Improvement Program and were selected in consultation with the Statewide Transportation Advisory Committee. The Colorado Transportation Commission approved the list at its January meeting.

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.

Denver International Airport recorded 4,101,004 passengers in October, a 1.3-percent decline from the 4,154,517 travelers who passed through the facility in the same month last year. Despite the small monthly drop, it was the third-busiest October ever at the Denver airport.

“We continue to be encouraged by the relatively small decline in our traffic,” Aviation Manager Kim Day said Friday. “Because of the sagging economy and the resulting cuts in airline capacity, we had expected we’d see a 2 to 2.5 percent drop in passengers from last year. And that’s where it looks like we will end 2009.”

Year to date through October, passenger traffic at DIA totaled 42,436,235. That was down 2.4 percent from the 43,492,803 travelers who used the facility during the same period of 2008.

DIA handled 49,952 flight operations in October, a decline of 1.0 percent from the same month of last year. For the first 10 months of 2009, DIA’s operations totaled 512,545, 2.8 percent below the 527,163 operations recorded in the same period of last year.

The complete traffic report will be available on DIA’s Web site by following this link:
http://www.flydenver.com/diabiz/stats/traffic/index.asp

RTD officials have said construction of the train to DIA is not dependent on getting federal grant money because it can be built using RTD funds and about $950 million in financing that the PPP companies are expected to bring to the project.

Go to the Denver Post to see the entire article.

Airlines say they expect 960,293 passengers to use Denver International Airport from today through Monday. The total is 31,073 higher than the 929,220 travelers who passed through DIA during Thanksgiving week last year.

The total makes this week the second-busiest Thanksgiving week in the history of the Denver airport. The busiest Thanksgiving week at DIA was in 2006 when, according to numbers provided by the airlines, 966,976 travelers used the airport.

Sunday, Nov. 29, will be the busiest day of the week with 160,854 travelers. That compares with 157,528 passengers on the Sunday after Thanksgiving last year. The following day, Monday, Nov. 30, will be nearly as busy with 160,063 travelers expected.

The busiest pre-Thanksgiving day this year will be Wednesday, Nov. 25, with 150,007 passengers. That compares with 146,325 on the same day of Thanksgiving week last year.

Other daily passenger totals for the holiday week are: Tuesday, 146,893; Thursday, 97,812; Friday, 106,042; and Saturday, 138,622.

The airport, the Transportation Security Administration, the airlines, and concessionaires will be fully staffed during the week.

To celebrate America Recycles Day on Nov. 15, Denver International Airport and 16 of its shops and restaurants will be rewarding passengers who recycle with gift certificates for an entire week starting on Monday, Nov. 16, and running through to Nov. 20. The way to win? Get caught “green handed” in the act of recycling something at one of Denver International Airport’s 520 special recycling bins.

Members of DIA’s Environmental Services team will be combing the main Jeppesen Terminal and the three concourses looking for passengers who are recycling. Participating restaurants have provided gift certificates for discounts on meals and beverages at the airport and include Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream; Boulder Beer Tap House; Burger King; Caribou Coffee; Chef Jimmy’s; The CofTea Shop; Dazbog Coffee; Einstein Bros. Bagels; Jamba Juice; Lefty’s Mile High Grille, Colorado Trails Grille and Front Range Grille; Mesa Verde Lounge; Red Rocks Bar & Grill; Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory; Schlotzsky’s Deli; TCBY and Coffee Beanery / UNO Pizza.

Denver International Airport is world-renowned for its environmental achievements, including being the first international airport in the United States to develop and implement a facility-wide, ISO-14001 certified Environmental Management System (EMS). The EMS is the tool that DIA uses to systematically and proactively manage the airport’s environmental programs. Denver International Airport’s environmental management has established many firsts in the United States and internationally:

• Received the FAA Environmental Stewardship Award (2007)
• Accepted into Colorado’s environmental leadership program as a Gold Level member (2004)
• Active participant in local and state sustainability initiatives, including Greenprint Denver and Colorado Climate Action Plan
• In 2008, DIA diverted over 1400 tons of municipal solid wastes from the landfill for recycling
• DIA is one of 10 international airports that are working together with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) to establish sustainability guidelines for the world’s airports

According to Janell Barrilleaux, Director of Environmental Programs at DIA, “America Recycles Day provides DIA with the opportunity to educate our traveling public, business partners and employees about the importance of recycling. Recycling conserves resources, reduces waste and in many cases, reduces costs. With the generous participation by our restaurants and shops, we’re hoping to raise the level of awareness about DIA’s environmental programs—and make it fun at the same time.”

For additional information about DIA’s Environmental Management System, visit http://www.flydenver.com/diaBiz/community/enviro/index.asp . For more information about America Recycles Day 2009, visit http://www.americarecyclesday.org/americarecycles.aspx .