FasTracks West Corridor to roll out signature bridge across 6th Avenue
Innovative construction technique saves months of traffic impacts

Lakewood, April 16, 2010 – The RTD FasTracks West Corridor team will roll out the main span of a double-track light rail bridge across 6th Avenue just east of Simms/Union the weekend of April 23rd through April 25th. All lanes of 6th Avenue between Simms/Union and Kipling Street will close at 8:00 p.m. on Friday, April 23rd to prepare the area for the roll-out, scheduled to begin early Saturday morning. 6th Avenue and the frontage road will re-open by 5:30 a.m. Monday, April 26th.

For the past several months, crews have been assembling the steel tied arch structure along the south side of the highway. Now, crews will transport the bridge into its final position over the highway via a large dolly consisting of two 35’ platforms with eight axles each. The arch will travel on guided rollers which are pushed by hydraulic rams capable of up to 270,000 pounds per square inch of force. At speeds ranging from 10 to 25 feet per hour, the actual roll-out is expected to take up to 30 hours for the bridge to connect with the north span already in place across the north 6th Avenue Frontage Road.

Had the structure been built over 6th Avenue, traveling motorists would have endured months of lane closures and traffic congestion. This approach to bridge construction enabled West Corridor crews to work in a safe environment outside of traffic and significantly minimize impacts to commuters using the 6th Avenue freeway.

“If the bridge had been constructed in place over the highway, we would have had to impact traffic on 6th Avenue many times over the course of construction instead of just one weekend as we are doing,” said Jim Starling, RTD’s West Corridor Project Manager. “This is a much more efficient process that minimizes inconvenience to the traveling public.”

The 12.1-mile West Corridor light rail project is the first rail line of RTD’s FasTracks program to start construction. The West Corridor line will operate between Denver Union Station in downtown Denver and the Jefferson County Government Center in Golden; serving Denver, Lakewood, the Denver Federal Center, Golden and Jefferson County. The corridor is scheduled to open to the public in 2013.

FasTracks is RTD’s voter-approved transit program to expand rail and bus service throughout the RTD service area. FasTracks will build 122 miles of commuter rail and light rail, 18 miles of bus rapid transit service, add 21,000 new parking spaces, redevelop Denver Union Station and redirect bus service to better connect the eight-county District. The FasTracks investment initiative is projected to create more than 10,000 jobs during the height of construction, and will pump billions of dollars into the regional economy.

By Kevin Flynn
Inside-Lane.com

With warmer weather to help it along, construction progress on the West Corridor light rail project is ramping up on all three areas into which it’s been divided.

The work may be most visible along the Sixth Avenue Freeway, where a dramatic steel arch bridge will be rolled out over the roadway during a full weekend closure in two weeks and a long curving bridge is winding its way over the Indiana Street interchange. Denver Transit Construction Group and its major subcontractors have almost all of the bridge structures underway.

RTD’s West Corridor is the first new FasTracks rail corridor to go to full construction.

Reprinted below is a report on construction progress given to the RTD board by General Manager Phil Washington on April 2:

CONSTRUCTION UPDATE – AREA 1 (Jeffco Government Center to Federal Center)
• Work on walls and drainage continues near I-70.
• Light rail bridge construction (pouring piers, footing work, and deck pours) is taking place on both sides of Indiana Street at 6th Avenue. Crews have stripped the wood forms from the north side of the bridge to expose the concrete setting of the bridge and begin the post-tensioning process between two spans of the bridge. The wood forms have been placed on the south side to begin pouring there.
• Crews continue working on the bridge over Colfax, they anticipate pouring the deck of the bridge within the next two weeks.
• Ulysses Street in Golden is closed from 6th Avenue north to Mt. Vernon Road to raise the street and install retaining walls. Improvements to the Lena Gulch on Ulysses at 6th Avenue will be winding down soon. Retaining wall construction could begin within the next few weeks.
• Work at the Jefferson County Government Center including excavation and retaining wall construction has begun. The current bike path has been detoured down Johnson Road to Jefferson County Parkway.
• Wall construction on the south side of 6th Avenue west of Simms/Union is near completion. Excavation and wall construction on the north side of 6th Avenue from Indiana to Colfax is on-going.
• Crews will begin removing trees and vegetation from the northwest corner of the Cold Springs park-n-Ride in preparation for the Simms/Union light rail tunnel.

CONSTRUCTION UPDATE – AREA 2 (East of the Federal Center to Sheridan)
• Work continues on the Wadsworth Bridge, crews are working on the formwork for the deck of the bridge.
• The post-tensioning of the cables on the arch of the 6th Avenue Bridge has been completed. Crews are currently stripping the formwork on the south side of the bridge, with the rollout of the bridge scheduled for April 23-25.
• Work on a drainage culvert on Collins Avenue north of 6th Avenue and east of Simms is near completion.
• Work continues on a drainage system on 13th Avenue from Zephyr to Carr Street. Crews are paving 13th Avenue between Wadsworth and Allison this week, local access is allowed. Weather pending, Allison is scheduled to be open next week.
• The encasement of the Rocky Mountain Ditch on 13th Avenue between Carr and Cody is ongoing. During this work, 13th Avenue will be closed from Carr – Dudley, local access will be allowed. Upon completion, crews will begin working on additional drainage improvements from Cody – Holland. 13th Avenue will remain closed to through traffic for this operation.
• Construction of the approach walls to the Wadsworth Bridge on the east side of Wadsworth is on-going and 13th Avenue between Wadsworth and Teller is now closed. Local access is allowed.
• Tree removal will begin on Monday, April 5 on the south side of 13th Avenue in the RTD right-of-way between Garrison and Dudley Street in preparation for the extension of the drainage system along 13th Avenue.

CONSTRUCTION UPDATE – AREA 3 (East of Sheridan to the Auraria Campus)
• Crews continue working on drainage improvements and drop structures in the Denver Parks Dry Gulch area.
• Relocation of utilities continues during the first phase of construction of the Federal Blvd. Bridge. Federal Boulevard has been phased down to two lanes in each direction, eliminating the left turn lane to Holden Place and left turns from Holden Place to Federal Boulevard. Traffic control is in place on Federal Boulevard between 10th Avenue- Howard Place. The pedestrian bridge over the gulch at Hazel Court is now open and the west side sidewalks of Federal have been closed down. Permanent fencing will be installed next week.
• Demolition of the properties west of Sheridan and south of the gulch are near completion.
• Work continues on the Sheridan Bridge.
• Crews have begun to weld rail for the trackway just west of I-25.
• Crews are grading the area and pouring sidewalks and bus bays in preparation of paving Knox Court. Knox Court should re-open by the third week of April.

General
• Environmental inspections and abatement of acquired properties continue.
• Right-of-way acquisition for the project continues.

The steel arch light rail bridge over Sixth Avenue Freeway will be rolled over the roadway in two weeks. Inside Lane photo.

Work crews will close the east- and west-bound center lanes of the heavily traveled highway between the Simms/Union exit Indiana Street beginning April 11 to move the Colorado Department of Transportation sign. The sign is in the middle of the highway near the area of the entrance road to Red Rocks College.

Go to Lakewood Edge to see the entire article.

The basket tied-handle arch bridge carrying the West Corridor light rail will cross over the Sixth Avenue Freeway right above the path of a former freight rail spur that until 1988 crossed the freeway at grade with a signalized crossing. Courtesy RTD.

By Kevin Flynn
Inside-Lane.com

“Roll Out the Barrel” is a polka standard, but Roll Out the Light Rail Bridge is anything but standard in construction.

Late next month, the weekend of April 23-26, metro residents will get to see a first-of-its-kind construction method in the United States.

The signature steel-arch bridge for RTD’s West Corridor light rail over the Sixth Avenue Freeway will be rolled into place, literally, over the highway from its temporary perch on a platform at the Denver Federal Center. This innovative construction method promises to save time and money for the traveling public and taxpayers.

The bridge is called a basket tied-handle arch; it resembles the curved handle of a wicker basket with the two sides angling in toward each other and meeting or “tied” at the top of the arch.

This temporary platform on the Denver Federal Center serves as a stage to build the arch; it will be launched over Sixth Avenue in April to connect with the pier at right rear, on the north side. Courtesy RTD.

The late Dennis Cole, who was RTD’s project manager for the West Corridor construction, once described it as “like the Egyptians built the pyramids.”

The installation will require a full closure of Sixth Avenue between Kipling Street and Simms-Union for the weekend of April 23-26. The Colorado Department of Transportation, RTD, West Corridor contractor Denver Transit Construction Group and bridge-building subcontractor Edward Kraemer & Sons collaborated to get the installation ready for a weekend after the height of ski season travel and before the start of the heavy summer driving season, to minimize the impact on traffic.

But the unusual method of installation also minimizes the need for recurring lane closures that would have been required under more standard construction methods with workers out in the middle of and over the freeway for months.

The bridge superstructure has been going up piece by piece on the south side of the freeway on the Denver Federal Center. The U.S. General Services Administration, which operates the center, and Lakewood officials worked closely with RTD to get the transit agency to adopt this signature bridge style.

RTD's initial design for the bridge was a traditional Warren truss-type span. Lakewood and the GSA lobbied for the arch style. Courtesy RTD.

But the city and the GSA, with plans to develop the federal center into a mixed-use commercial area, wanted something more memorable than that. Together they ran estimates showing that the basket tied-handle arch would be less expensive. RTD was persuaded and the swap was done.

“The entire steel arch structure is fabricated from weathering steel and the arches incline inwards toward each other to form a ‘basket-handled tied arch’ style of bridge,” RTD says in its latest West Corridor newsletter. “The tensioned cables are 2 3/8” inch diameter galvanized steel and are arranged in a crossed-cable pattern that provide an important piece of the structural integrity as well as being visually attractive.”

After it is connected to the side span already in place over the north frontage road, Kraemer’s crews will begin installing the concrete decking.

RTD photo shows Kraemer's construction reaching the apex of the arch.

The first night of girder setting for the FasTracks West Corridor light rail bridge over Wadsworth at 13th Avenue in Lakewood went as planned, said Kathy Berumen, spokeswoman for Denver Transit Construction Group. That is the contractor for RTD.

Edward Kraemer & Sons is the bridge subcontractor building this structure.

You can view a slideshow of the girders. The photos were taken on Tuesday.

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.

Rendering courtesy of RTD and Denver Transit Construction Group shows the completed basic bridge span over Wadsworth, with future conceptual development nearby.

By Kevin Flynn
Inside-Lane.com

Construction of the FasTracks West Corridor light rail project will reach a milestone next week with three overnight closures of Wadsworth Boulevard at 13th Avenue to set girders on what is planned to be Lakewood’s signature bridge.

The Wadsworth Station on the West Corridor will be smack on top of the bridge. Lakewood is negotiating with RTD to pay for an extra $2.6 million in “betterments” to upgrade the bridge and make it the center of the city’s transit-oriented redevelopment of the area.

View across Wadsworth looking west shows the concrete bridge pier sitting between two steel falsework supports, with the west bridge abutment behind it all. Inside Lane photo.

Starting at 7 p.m. next Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, crews will close off one lane of Wadsworth in each direction to start staging for each night’s work. Then at 10 p.m., Wadsworth will be closed to traffic entirely between 10th and Colfax avenues.

The street is scheduled to reopen each morning by 5:30 a.m. The work is, as always, weather-dependent and could change. Inside Lane will keep you informed if that happens.

While local access to nearby streets will be permitted during the closures, overnight through-traffic is being advised to use Sheridan Boulevard or Kipling Street.

Welders for Edward Kraemer & Sons prepare steel falsework framing to help support next week's girder installation at Wadsworth and 13th Avenue. Inside Lane photo.

The schedule for the work goes like this:

The west side span girders will be placed Monday night. The east side girders are set for Tuesday night. The big ones over Wadsworth get placed on Wednesday night.

The heaviest girders weigh more than 41 tons. The side-span girders are 64 feet in length.

Kathy Berumen of Denver Transit Construction Group said the bridge work is on schedule. Already, DTCG’s subcontractors have set girders for the light rail bridges at Kipling Street, Colfax Avenue, Sixth Avenue North Frontage Road, the tunnel under Interstate 70, two bridges in Dry Gulch, one over Lakewood Gulch and at Decatur Street, as well as on the southbound lanes of the new Federal Boulevard vehicular bridge that will go over the tracks.

The West Corridor light rail line is scheduled to open in 2013, likely around mid-year, after construction completion allows RTD to conduct a period of testing on it, as it has done with all its other lines.

For information on upcoming construction activities, you can view the West Corridor Construction Information Page here for the West Corridor. To speak to Berumen about construction activities, call 720-989-8099.

You can view a slideshow of the preparations here. The photos were taken on Thursday.

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.

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.

All lanes of Colfax Avenue between Quaker Street and 6th Avenue will be closed overnight from 9 p.m. Sunday, December 6 to 5:30 a.m. Monday, December 7 to allow construction crews to place the girders on the bridge over Colfax.

The westbound 6th Avenue on-ramp at Indiana will be closed overnight from 10:00 p.m. Wednesday, December 9 to 5:30 a.m. Thursday, November 10 to allow crews to work on the bridge over Indiana and 6th Avenue.

Closure Event – Sunday, December 6, 2009:

All lanes of Colfax Avenue will be closed between Quaker Street and 6th Avenue from 9 p.m. to 5:30 a.m. so crews can set girders on the Colfax Avenue Light Rail Bridge.

Closure Event – Wednesday, December 9, 2009:

The westbound 6th Avenue on-ramp at Indiana will be closed from 10 p.m. to 5:30 a.m. so crews can work on the Indiana Light Rail Bridge.

Be advised that all construction activities are weather-dependent and subject to change. For complete up-to-date information on upcoming construction activities, access the Construction Information Page for the West Corridor on the Web at www.RTD-Fastracks.com. To speak to someone about construction activities, please call Kathy Berumen at 720-989-8099.

Looking south on Sheridan Boulevard from around 12th Place, Dry Gulch crosses under a culvert. The road will be down to two lanes for two years for light rail bridge construction.

Two lanes, two years. Get ready, drivers, for what may be the West Corridor light rail project’s most inconvenient traffic impact.

Starting Monday night and lasting for about the next two years, four-lane Sheridan Boulevard between 10th and 14th avenues will be narrowed down to two lanes. If you can get through this, you can get through most anything FasTracks will throw at your drive over the next eight years.

The lane restriction was part of a trade-off that allowed RTD to stick its original plan to leave the FasTracks West Corridor tracks at ground level along the Dry Gulch valley while raising Sheridan on a bridge above the gulch.

On Monday night, Sheridan will be closed entirely overnight between 10th and 14th starting at 9 p.m. so that workers can set up the narrowed detour route, using the existing two northbound lanes on the east side of the street. The plan is to reopen to traffic at 5:30 a.m. Tuesday in the reduced configuration. Workers already have placed a new sidewalk along the east side of Sheridan as part of the detour work.

Two-lane traffic will stay on the east side until Lawrence Construction builds the southbound half of the Sheridan bridge to the west of the detour. At that point, two-lane traffic will be shifted to the southbound side while Lawrence completes the northbound bridge lanes.

Rendering of the Sheridan light rail station with Sheridan Boulevard raised on a new bridge over Dry Gulch.

Traffic counts by the Colorado Department of Transportation show an estimated 33,100 vehicles a day use this segment of Sheridan Boulevard. That’s about the same number that travel Colfax Avenue between Sheridan and Federal boulevards.

“We realize that this will be a tremendous inconvenience to the traveling public and we will do everything we can to complete construction in this area as quickly as possible,” said Kathy Berumen, spokeswoman for Denver Transit Construction Group. DTCG is RTD’s general contractor and construction manager for the civil construction of the West Corridor.

The suggested detour routes are Federal and Wadsworth boulevards.

The bridge will be a two-span structure with a total length of just over 265 feet from end to end. From the top of the light rail tracks to the underside of the bridge girders will be a clearance of 20 feet, three inches. Bridge construction is valued at $3.9 million.

Site plan for Sheridan Station showing the light rail under a new Sheridan bridge. Click on the picture to get a larger version.

This was pretty much the original West Corridor plan, to build the light rail tracks at grade along Dry Gulch as it crosses Sheridan. The gulch cuts a deep swale that drivers on Sheridan take like a roller coaster ride. A few blocks south, near Eighth Avenue, another big dip occurs where Lakewood Gulch crosses Sheridan.

Residents of the area liked the plan. The hill from 10th down to the gulch then up again toward 14th is hazardous especially in icy weather. Sight lines are poor. Raising Sheridan will mitigate those problems. Also, leaving the tracks on the ground while raising Sheridan would unite the open spaces on both sides – to the east it’s Denver’s Lakewood and Dry Gulch Park, on the west it’s open space in Lakewood. It allows the light rail station there to be in a park-like setting accessible by bike and pedestrians as well as motorists via a parking garage.

But RTD, faced with massive FasTracks cost increases in 2006, started looking for cuts through so-called “value engineering,” an exercise in finding different and less expensive ways to accomplish project goals. RTD brought in outside experts and used in-house staff to brainstorm cuts on the West Corridor. Flip-flopping the grade separation at the Sheridan crossing was a sizable savings. RTD estimated it could save more than $7 million if, instead of raising Sheridan on a bridge over Dry Gulch and the light rail tracks, it left Sheridan on the ground and simply bridged the light rail over the street.

Residents, Denver planners and Lakewood pushed back. RTD agreed to reconsider if a cost-neutral way could be found to reinstate the original design.

When CDOT was willing to waive a requirement that RTD maintain existing traffic flow during the construction period – combined with Denver providing some local park funds, RTD saved enough money to restore the original design.

Relieving the need to provide a four-lane detour through the construction zone allowed RTD to reduce the amount of real estate it would have to acquire by eminent domain alongside Sheridan for the temporary route. It also allowed for a reduction in traffic control costs.

Elevation rendering shows cross-section of Sheridan bridge looking north with the light rail station below it. Click on the picture to get a larger version.

Contractor crews led by Railroad Specialties of Littleton do track welding as part of the expansion of the Elati light rail maintenance facility and train yard, a part of FasTracks. RTD Photo.

RTD has spent or committed $1.17 billion so far on FasTracks, one-sixth of the total estimated cost through 2017 of its rapid-transit expansion program.

The commitment level represents items already paid for plus current work now under contract – 17 percent of the total $6.9 billion projected cost.

Funds have been committed to all 10 rapid transit rail and bus corridors plus assorted common elements such as conversion of Denver Union Station into FasTracks’ main hub, expansion of the light rail maintenance facility in Englewood and planning for a new maintenance facility for heavy-rail commuter train cars.

A significant portion of the commitments have been made to corridors facing cutbacks if no new revenues are found to complete them. Public officials representing those corridors, mostly in Aurora, Adams County, Broomfield and Boulder County, have criticized RTD as short-changing them. The expenditures on them so far are for such things as environmental studies and preliminary engineering and design work, right-of-way acquisition and purchase of train cars to run on them.

The figures were laid out Tuesday in an update RTD gave to a task force of the Metro Mayors Caucus. Along with other stakeholders, the caucus – which unanimously backed the sales tax hike that voters approved in 2004 to pay for FasTracks – is now working with RTD toward an agreement over how to proceed now that FasTracks can’t meet its original 2017 completion date with its current projected revenues.

Hefty increases in construction costs, freight railroad requirements and added project scope, combined with the floor falling out of revenue projections during the recession, have left the program with what is currently a $2.2 billion funding gap in the 2017 plan. What was to cost $4.7 billion when voters approved FasTracks is now, with the additions, projected to cost $6.9 billion.

Sixty percent of the commitment is for the first FasTracks rail corridor to go to full construction, the West Corridor light rail through Denver, Lakewood and Golden. RTD has spent or contracted the total $707.6 million cost of the 12.1-mile line. Of that, about $510 million is for the two major construction contracts with Denver Transit Construction Group and Balfour Beatty. The rest is for the required environmental impact study, engineering, design and land acquisition.

Retaining wall along Sixth Avenue Freeway will support light rail track as it goes up and over Sixth and Indiana Street on the concrete piers in the distance. RTD Photo.

Ironically, the two corridors with the next-highest commitment levels are among the ones threatened with cuts because of the program’s funding gap. The North Metro commuter rail corridor, an 18-mile electrified heavy-rail project through Denver, Commerce City and Thornton, has $135.7 million in spending and committed funds. RTD has spent about $125 million for corridor property, including $117 million to purchase the Union Pacific freight track right-of-way it will use for the project.

The third-place corridor is the Interstate 225 light rail extension in Aurora, where 88 percent of the $70.9 million committed so far is tied up in a contract with Siemens to produce all of the light rail train cars that will be used on it. Several of the vehicles already have been delivered to RTD.

North Metro and I-225 fall into the group of projects threatened with cuts in part because they do not qualify for federal funding. The issue has created conflict between RTD and the communities that would be served by those threatened lines because the transit agency wants to complete the ones that do qualify for federal assistance – the West Corridor along with the East Corridor commuter rail to Denver International Airport and the Gold Line to Arvada and Wheat Ridge. West Corridor already has secured a $308 million grant agreement from the Federal Transit Administration. The East Corridor and Gold Line qualify for $1 billion combined in federal grants.

Cutting them back would cost the program that federal assistance. Conversely, RTD says, if it doesn’t get the federal grants at all, it will only be able to fully construct the East Corridor to DIA, along with the West Corridor, by 2017. In that case, the Gold Line would be put on hold as well as the other remaining corridors, possibly to all be built only as existing funds allow over time.

But officials in those other corridors are demanding equity since their residents are paying the four-tenths cent sales tax for FasTracks. RTD and the mayors are discussing whether to go to voters as early as next year to ask for a second sales tax increase to complete these at-risk lines.

One proposal, from Mayor Ed Tauer of Aurora, is that the second tax be earmarked for the at-risk lines. RTD is examining the ramifications of such a restriction.

RTD annually evaluates its cost and revenue projections, and plans to have new figures in January. Estimated costs could go up, but like earlier this year, they could also go down as worldwide construction materials prices back off their historic highs from 2005 onward. In 2008, RTD estimated FasTracks’ total 2017 costs at $7.9 billion; the estimate dropped by $1 billion this year. But the revenue projection fell more, resulting in the $2.2 billion shortfall.

“We are continuing to analyze the implications of this approach, and to work with our stakeholders to determine how to move forward,” said FasTracks planner Julie Skeen.

Funds committed to FasTracks program elements:

• $707.6 million: West Corridor light rail
• $135.7 million: North Metro commuter rail
• $92.5 million: Denver Union Station conversion
• $70.9 million: Interstate 225 light rail
• $40.1 million: East Corridor commuter rail
• $28.3 million: Southeast Corridor light rail extension
• $22.5 million: Southwest Corridor light rail extension
• $18.7 million: US 36 Bus Rapid Transit project
• $14.3 million: Expansion of Elati light rail maintenance facility
• $12.2 million: Northwest Rail commuter rail
• $11.5 million: Gold Line commuter rail
• $10.6 million: Central Corridor light rail extension
• $6.6 million: Commuter rail maintenance facility

• $1,171.5 million: Total committed funds