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:

Pelosi was in Broomfield to tout the anniversary of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The project to widen U.S. 36 will receive $10 million from the Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery program. The project was one of 51 winners selected from more than 1,400 applicants. The grant was announced Feb. 17.

“Improving and updating U.S. 36 can serve as a national model in investing in our infrastructure while greening our nation and creating good-paying jobs,” Pelosi said.

Go to the Boulder Daily Camera to see the entire article and a video report.

PEDESTRIAN BRIDGE WORK AT 116TH AVENUE NEXT TO 1STBANK CENTER
(FORMERLY THE BROOMFIELD EVENTS CENTER)

Denver, February 26, 2010 – Crews for the Regional Transportation District (RTD) are scheduled to close one lane in each direction of U.S. 36 between Church Ranch Boulevard and Wadsworth Parkway from 6 a.m. through 9 a.m. tomorrow, Saturday, Feb. 27. Crews will pour the curbs on the deck of the pedestrian bridge near the 1STBANK Center (formerly Broomfield Events Center), as part of the U.S. 36 Phase I Transit Improvements.

Starting at 6 a.m., one lane in each direction of U.S. 36 will be closed and will reopen at 9 a.m. All construction activities are weather-dependent and subject to change.

The completion of the pedestrian bridge is the first step in moving the existing park-n-Ride from 120th Avenue and Wadsworth to the Arista Grand Parkade at Transit Way, which will occur this May.

The new park-n-Ride location and bus ramps will complete U.S. 36 Phase I Transit Improvements, which combine to save a total of up to 15 minutes for bus commuters each way between Denver and Boulder. The next phase of the project is a joint Colorado Department of Transportation/RTD U.S. 36 Corridor project, which includes highway and Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) elements and is partially funded through FasTracks.

U.S. 36 BRT service is proposed to run along the 18-mile corridor between Downtown Denver and Boulder. It will serve Denver, Westminster, Broomfield, Superior, Louisville and Boulder.
For more information on the project, visit www.RTD-FasTracks.com.

Jefferson County, Broomfield and Arvada have been promoting the toll highway, which would run from the Interlocken commercial complex just off U.S. 36 to CO 93 north of Golden. Officials from the city of Golden and communities in Boulder County were among those opposing the effort to include the toll highway in DRCOG’s plan.

Go to the Denver Post to see the entire article.

Looking southwest from US 36, the 120th Avenue Connection will cross this field.

The Colorado Department of Transportation, Broomfield and the Federal Highway Administration are funding the $23 million design-build project that is being handled by a team headed by Edward Kraemer & Sons and HNTB. The construction period is about 18 months.

The parties are holding a groundbreaking ceremony Thursday morning at the site.

The traffic problem exists there primarily because the Boulder Turnpike, which is U.S. 36, cuts diagonally right through the area where Wadsworth Parkway on the south, CO 128 on the west, U.S. 287 on the north and 120th Avenue on the east converge. You can read about the history of the Boulder Turnpike here.

It forces all sorts of maneuvers that traffic engineers call “out of direction turns,” through which drivers have to zig-zag out of their direction of travel in order to keep going the way they were headed.

The problem is made worse by growth in traffic over the years that overwhelms the road network.

The first part of the 120th Avenue Connection project will design and build the new roadway, in red, and the local streets running north-south, in dark blue. A later phase will complete the tie-in to 120th Avenue on the east, in light blue on the right.

This initial phase of construction will build the major elements, including a new bridge curving over the turnpike about four-tenths of a mile southeast of the Wadsworth Parkway bridge. It will allow east-west traffic to bypass the worst of the congestion.

But this first phase won’t complete the roadway connection on the east side. Because the new curving roadway must bridge over the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway tracks, cut a swath through some developed private properties and require extensive realignment of the current local streets including turning some into cul-de-sacs, neither CDOT nor Broomfield has the estimated additional $40 million this later phase will cost. Much of that cost will be for acquiring the right-of-way.

In that later phase, the connection would be made to existing 10th Avenue at Teller Street. That would give the complete new roadway a length of about 1.2 miles.

It’s a lesson in how sometimes, the funding situation in transportation forces agencies into breaking up projects into segments that can stand alone and provide some relief to safety, mobility or other issues without yet completing the whole project. Building serviceable segments in stages when they can be paid for makes sense, while planning for funding for the remainder.

But for now, traffic on the east will connect to 120th by turning onto an extended Commerce Street.

You can read here the 2005 Environmental Assessment document that studied the project and other alternatives.

Design-build is a method of project delivery that combines final design with the construction process, taking the owner’s performance requirements and allowing the contracting team the ability to achieve potential cost and schedule savings by blending the design-construction process in real time.

This was the process used by CDOT and RTD on the successful T-REX highway and transit project on Interstates 25 and 225, which was completed in 2006. CDOT is using it for several other multi-faceted road projects, and RTD intends to use in to try to cut costs on its remaining FasTracks transit corridors.

Impact studies and plans for the $90 million project — of which Broomfield is projected to pay $19.6 million — have been in the works since 2001.

The Colorado Department of Transportation and Broomfield hosted an open house last week to inform residents what to expect. About a dozen engineers and officials from the two agencies used charts and artist renderings to explain their plans.

The first phases of the project will build a six-lane viaduct to carry traffic over U.S. 36 and another bridge to carry traffic over Commerce Street. The western terminus is the intersection of Colo. 128 and Wadsworth Parkway, near the current RTD Park-n-Ride. The eastern end point is Wadsworth Boulevard.

Read the entire story in the Daily Camera.

The authority`s aim is to find private companies to design, finance, build, maintain and operate a privately-owned toll road that would one day connect the Northwest Parkway in Broomfield to Interstate 70 near Golden.

Read the full story in the Broomfield Enterprise.