Where jetliners used to cross Interstate 70, Denver soon will be building a new $50.6 million interchange project that will reunite the south side of the old Stapleton airfield with the north side. But this time, it’s not 747s or DC-10s that will go over top of I-70 traffic, but Stapleton neighborhood residents, regional shoppers and other highway travelers.
The Regional Transportation District has put together a $122.6 million wish list of projects that are ready to go in the event Congress approves a second stimulus program for transportation infrastructure. Half of that total consists of four FasTracks pieces totaling $60.5 million.
DRCOG Press Release
In light of the recent announcement of discontinuation of the Front Range Commuter Express (FREX) service, workers commuting between Colorado Springs and Denver may think they have no other choice but to get back into a car. Not so, says a representative of the Denver Regional Council of Governments (DRCOG) “Getting into a vanpool is an excellent alternative for former FREX users to share expenses, make new friends and keep the stress-free commute they enjoy,” says Linda Dowlen, manager of DRCOG’s RideArrangers program.
Vanpools are a good choice for groups of commuters who live and work near each other and travel more than 15 miles to work one-way. Passengers share the ride and pay a low monthly fare to the designated driver in a minivan seating up to six, or a full-size van seating up to 12. The Vanpool program is a partnership between DRCOG and the Regional Transportation District (RTD). DRCOG also offers a free matching service for people commuting into or out of the Denver metro area interested in starting carpools using their own vehicles.
For more information on vanpools or FREE carpool matching services please visit www.drcog.org and click on RideArrangers. For more information please call 303-458-POOL.
DRCOG’s RideArrangers helps businesses and individuals avoid traffic congestion and reduce pollution by promoting and providing transportation options. RideArrangers is a partner with Metro Rides of Colorado Springs and VanGo of Fort Collins in the Front Range Vanpool Services program, helping long-distance commuters reach their destinations.
Traffic passes through a construction zone at University Boulevard and Arapahoe Road. Planners say understanding details about where these drivers are headed, where they stop along the way and when they do it will help them plan future road and transit improvements.
How you will be getting around the Front Range in the future is being shaped in part by a randomly chosen set of 12,000 households from Fort Collins to Pueblo in the first comprehensive Front Range Travel Counts survey.
Starting last summer in the Fort Collins area, the surveys are now in the process of being collected in the Denver metro area. Half of the households participating in the survey will come from Denver metro area.
The results will be statistically analyzed to help transportation planners understand the needs for highway and transit projects with better information on travel patterns.
The Denver Post reports that the Denver Regional Council of Governments board of directors voted Wednesday night to include the proposed Jefferson Parkway toll road in the group’s long-range transportation plan. The vote was 35 to 17.
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.
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CO 103, the highway from Idaho Springs to the Mount Evans Road and over Squaw Pass, would be on the list of resurfacing projects to be done in the next fiscal year with FASTER revenues.
CDOT is drafting a list of potential projects to be funded with the next three years’ worth of FASTER revenues, in part to be prepared to answer lawmakers’ anticipated questions during the current session about how the controversial funds would be spent.
The Colorado Department of Transportation is circulating the draft list among transportation planning agencies around that state and through its own six state regional directors. The list contains the road safety portion of the FASTER program, in which funds are spent to repair poor roadways or improve safety on them.
It represents projects that, without FASTER funding, either wouldn’t get done or would end up using funds that otherwise would be spent on other projects.
The Denver Business Journal reports that Wednesday’s public hearing on the last leg of Denver’s beltway is likely to draw a crowd. The issue is whether to include the 20-mile section between U.S. 36 through Golden and down to Interstate 70 in the region’s long-range transportation plan.
Getting a project included in the plan is a critical step among many that are needed to bring a proposal to reality.
But opponents are lining up against adding the initial phase of an estimated $203 million, 10-mile, private toll road dubbed the Jefferson Parkway. The first phase runs between between CO 93 and CO 128.
The Denver Regional Council of Governments will hold the public hearing at 7 p.m. in the Colorado History Museum Boettcher Auditorium, 1300 Broadway.
Go to the Denver Business Journal to see the entire article.
Bing bird’s-eye view shows historic Hangar 61 at former Stapleton Airport. The unusual structure is one of tens of thousands of parcels in a DRCOG report for transportation planners.
Transportation planners are legally obligated to consider the impacts of highway or transit improvements on potentially historic sites.
It’s hard for me to think of buildings being historic when I am older than they are.
But federal law says properties older than 50 years can be evaluated for historic preservation. For planners, there is now a helpful tool to use when they work on transportation corridors in metro Denver. The Denver Regional Council of Governments has put together a data-heavy report, using Geographic Information System data from all but one of the nine counties in the DRCOG region, that shows planners the locations of tens of thousands of parcels with historic-qualified properties.
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U.S. 285 between Bailey and Richmond Hill Road would get a new asphalt surface along with safety improements such as lengthened merge areas at the end of climbing lanes for slower vehicles.
About $16.5 million in road safety and resurfacing projects are headed to the Denver metro area through next summer because of the first year’s allocation of increased auto registration fees under the FASTER bill.
The projects for the area covered by the Denver Regional Council of Governments are on a list of 41 roadway safety and improvement projects funded statewide by FASTER’s first year of revenues totaling just under $80 million. The list is based on August estimates of revenue and could change depending on how much actually comes in.
The single largest FASTER road safety project in the DRCOG area is the proposed asphalt resurfacing of U.S. 285 from Bailey to Richmond Hill Road, estimated at $4.5 million, more than a quarter of the DRCOG area’s total. But it is more than a new asphalt overlay. CDOT plans to enhance driver safety by lengthening the tapered ends of several of the climbing lanes, giving more room for slower vehicles to merge into the through lane at the tops of hills.
The Denver metro region will sacrifice as much as $38.5 billion a year in economic output if it fails to spend the money necessary to resolve traffic congestion, according to a study by the Reason Foundation of gridlock’s impact on economic growth.
In a study called “Gridlock and Growth: The Effect of Traffic Congestion on Regional Economic Performance,” the libertarian think tank based in California examined eight metropolitan areas, including Denver, and attempted to quantify the increase in economic production it says would result from improved mobility in free-flowing traffic conditions.
Of the eight regions, Denver had the second-biggest bang for the transportation buck, Reason reasoned. Investing at least $10 billion over the next 20 years, according to the study, would leverage up to $38.5 billion each year in added economic output – a ratio of 77-to-1.
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