Denver's design shows the new bridge, in green, with a traditional diamond-type interchange on I-70 and a set of braided ramps, in purple, on the west side connecting to I-270.

By Kevin Flynn
Inside-Lane.com

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 new interchange will carry the Stapleton neighborhood’s Central Park Boulevard over I-70 to Northfield Boulevard in the growing commercial area where Stapleton’s two old north-south runways used to be.

The project is being done by SEMA Construction and Wilson and Company under a design-build contract with Denver. In January, SEMA was given the Notice to Proceed, and the design phase is at 40 percent completion, according to Steven Coggins, Denver’s project manager. Construction is expected to start in June with completion anticipated by October 2011.

A TWA jet is on take-off from Stapleton's old Runway 35 crossing I-70. Several years later, a second north-south runway was added north of I-70 and a second tunnel-bridge was built next to this one for the access taxiway. Photo at Matt Salek's Milepost 61 blog.

The project is using a mix of funding sources including the city’s Better Denver bond program, which is providing up to $30 million.

It is also using $12 million in federal stimulus funds through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act competitive grants program, channeled through the Denver Regional Council of Governments; and $8 million in other federal transportation funding.

And this week, the Colorado Transportation Commission is expected to approve an application for $1 million in earmarked Interstate Maintenance funds from the Federal Highway Administration to add the replacement of 800 feet of dilapidated concrete on the ramp from westbound I-70 to Interstate 270 to the project. The new ramps tied into this segment but initially it was going to be left as-is.

The Colorado Department of Transportation, which controls I-70, is providing oversight.

Rendering from Denver's interchange study shows the conceptual layout of the wide bridge planned for Central Park Boulevard over I-70. Ramps from and to I-270 straddle I-70 under the bridge.

The “spaghetti” of ramps will allow drivers direct access into both sides of Stapleton via a new Central Park Boulevard bridge, which will cross I-70 just to the east of the existing airport cargo bridge. That is the only bridge over the highway left from Stapleton’s airport days, but it was not adequate for re-use. Central Park Boulevard’s bridge will be between the cargo bridge and the spot where old Runway 17R-35L used to cross over on a long bridge that formed a tunnel carrying I-70. Just to the east of that spot, there used to be a second I-70 tunnel over which a taxiway to Runway 17L-35R was located.

While development of the Stapleton neighborhood has pretty much erased traces of the old runways south of I-70, there are still vestiges of them remaining on the north side.

The Stapleton developer, Forest City Enterprises, will spend an additional amount up to $20 million to construct the extension of Central Park Boulevard from 36th Avenue to Northfield Boulevard.

The design includes two “braided” style ramps, which allow traffic to and from I-270 to cross over entrance and exit ramps from I-70 to Central Park Boulevard. Braided ramps lift one flow of traffic over another to let them change sides without conflict.

While more expensive to build, braided ramps are much safer than old-style “weave lanes” in which traffic trying to merge left onto a freeway had to compete with traffic merging right to get off. Recently constructed examples are at southbound Interstate 25 and Speer Boulevard, and northbound I-25 at Belleview Avenue/Interstate 225.

Old CDOT photo shows then-new I-70 tunnel going under Stapleton Airport's Runway 17-35. Later, a second tunnel was built for the highway, closer to front of photo, for a taxiway to a new runway on the north airfield.

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. RTD also has come up with seven projects totaling $13.1 million to upgrade the existing rail system as well as a dozen base-system projects totaling $49 million.

You can read the entire RTD list of projects by clicking here.

The largest single item on RTD’s list is $32 million to fund relocation of a range of Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway facilities from the joint Gold Line-Northwest Rail FasTracks commuter rail corridors between Denver Union Station and Pecos Street, and the proposed commuter rail maintenance facility on Fox Street north of 48th Avenue.

RTD intends to route the Gold Line, a heavy-rail corridor serving Denver, Adams County, Arvada and Wheat Ridge, alongside the BNSF and Union Pacific right-of-way north out of downtown, and the funding would help move things around to make room. The corridor is shared as far as Pecos Junction with the Northwest Rail, which is a heavy-rail commuter project that would Westminster, Broomfield, Boulder and Longmont.

A typical Bus Rapid Transit vehicle of the type that would be used on the US 36 FasTracks BRT corridor. Courtesy RTD.

RTD is eager to replace some of the Denver-Boulder coaches because of their age and wear. It has documented undercarriage corrosion on some vehicles, and the mileage on the current fleet of 49 coaches ranges from 900,000 miles to three million miles. They are 12 years old.

The Denver-Boulder runs have seen a huge increase in ridership. In the five years from 2003 to 2008, daily boardings on the Route B, as it is called, increased 65 percent to an average of 6,356 per day.

RTD wants to replace the fleet of over-the-road coaches that has seen some vehicles rack up to three million miles in service. It has documented undercarriage corrosion on some of them. Courtesy RTD.

RTD’s list can never be fully funded by the proposed federal jobs and stimulus package, which currently totals $8.4 billion for transit projects and $27.5 billion for highways to be spread nationwide. But transportation planners consider it essential to be prepared with a flexible list of projects from which the ones that best fit the as-yet-unknown rules can be selected.

Last year’s stimulus, for instance, required that half of the highway money allocated to states be obligated to shovel-ready projects within 90 days. Planner say the new bill, called Jobs for Main Street, may have an even tighter time frame for some funds, necessitating that a variety of projects be poised for funding.

The Colorado Department of Transportation also has its new shovel-ready list, with 90 projects adding up to $701.3 million. Click here to read that list.

As part of the process of authorizing these projects for federal funding, the Denver Regional Council of Governments has scheduled a public hearing for 6:30 p.m. March 3 at 1290 Broadway.

In addition to taking testimony from the public on the RTD list, DRCOG also invites the public to comment on the $421.4 million share of highway projects on the CDOT list that are located in whole or part within the nine-county metro Denver DRCOG territory.

You can read the break-out of CDOT highway projects in the DRCOG region by clicking here.

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.

By Kevin Flynn
Inside-Lane.com

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. Individual replies are kept confidential, while the answers are aggregated into statistical results.

The participants are being solicited based on a random process from among all residential addresses. Are you a participant? If so, Inside Lane would like to hear from you about your experience. Email me at Kevin@inside-lane.com.

The information being gleaned is much more than “where did you go?” Here is a Frequently Asked Questions page about the survey.

Households that are chosen and agree to participate are given a travel diary in which they record not only when they go somewhere, but how, what route, what stops they make along the way, who they have with them, the activities they engaged in at their destinations – even if they stop along the way to go through a drive-through bank or fill up with gas.

Here is a brochure the households receive explaining their participation.

The information will help planners understand how people organize their trips, and that in turn will help them plan transportation projects that meet those needs.

Households will fill in a diary for a specified 24-hour period, running from 3 a.m. to 3 a.m.

The program is being led by the Denver Regional Council of Governments, Pikes Peak Area Council of Governments, North Front Range Metropolitan Planning Organization, Pueblo Area Council of Governments, Colorado Department of Transportation and Regional Transportation District.

The Denver area surveys are being done through June 1, and is about 40 percent complete, said Erik Sabina, regional modeling manager for DRCOG . Colorado Springs and Pueblo household surveys are just now getting underway. The North Front Range survey has been completed.

Here is DRCOG’s web site giving information about the survey.

The survey asks for non-travel information as well. Participants are asked about household income level, for instance, because planners say that the level of income is closely related to how people travel. Likewise, the number of people in a household also has a bearing on travel routines, as anyone who has to pick up their kids from school and get them to soccer practice or music lessons can tell you.

“We ask a number of questions about households and the people in them because we are not only trying to describe travel patterns but also understand why they occur,” reads a question-and-answer explainer from the survey sponsors. “By collecting household characteristics along with travel patterns, we are able to better understand why people travel the way they do and this also enables us to estimate future travel patterns as the population grows and changes.”

For more information about the household survey, please visit the official web site or call the survey hotline at 1-888-222-7734.

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.

By Kevin Flynn
Inside-Lane.com

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 concerns the road safety portion of the FASTER program, in which funds are spent to repair poor roadways or improve safety on them.

The list doesn’t deal with the separate bridge replacement fee portion of FASTER, which CDOT is handling under a new enterprise fund.

But it does represent 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 draft list for fiscal year 2010-11, which begins in July, has $100.5 million worth of projects on it; $61.1 million are in the nine-county area covered by the Denver Regional Council of Governments.

For fiscal year 2011-12, the draft list contains $95.1 million in projects, with $45.3 in the DRCOG area; the 2012-13 fiscal year list has $77.2 million in projects with $32.6 in the DRCOG area.

The list is by no means final, but it is being circulated to planners throughout the state for their review, comment and collaboration in coming up with the final list. Transportation officials hope to have a final list approved in February.

Among the larger projects on the draft list:
• $10 million for widening and resurfacing 22 miles of CO 103, from Idaho Springs up and around Echo Lake and over to Squaw Pass in Clear Creek County.
• $8 million for work on about two miles of CO 9 in Summit County north of Breckenridge to continue widening to four lanes, build new approaches, drainage, raised median, curb and gutter, and intersection improvements, and relocate the bike path.
• $7 million for a full reconstruction of four miles of U.S. 50 in Gunnison County to add eight-foot shoulders and passing lanes; this is a high-accident segment with many head-on collisions.
• $5.5 million to build passing lanes on 1.5 miles of U.S. 550 between Ridgway and Colona in Ouray County.
• $5 million for safety shoulders on CO 93 to address high accident rate on the highway between Golden and Boulder in Jefferson County.
• $3.9 million to widen both inside and outside shoulders on Interstate 70 between Tower Road and Colfax Avenue in Adams County, due to high truck traffic, and also correct the currently substandard “superelevation,” or banking of the highway, at curves.
• $3.5 million to resurface nearly 10 miles of CO 86 from the city of Kiowa east to Calhan Road in Elbert County.
• $3.1 million for intersection improvements at the high-accident location of U.S. 287 and Lowell Boulevard in Broomfield; will add double-left turns and new signal timing.
• $3 million to install fiber optic lines along U.S. 50 from Cañon City to LaJunta, or on Interstate 25 from Pueblo to Trinidad, to expand the “Smart Highways” network and improve communication with travelers through Variable Message Signs and improve coordination of traffic signals.
• $2.7 million to widen the bridge on Jordan Road over Newlin Gulch in Parker, Douglas County, to fix substandard left turns, as well as the right-turn deceleration and acceleration lanes.
• $2.25 million for intersection improvements at the high-accident location of CO 52 and Weld County Road 11.
• $2.1 million to provide lighting at four I-70 chain-up stations in Clear Creek and Summit counties, and to double-post 12 Variable Message Signs in the median at the approaches to those stations.

You can look at the entire draft list of projects over the next three fiscal years here.

The state estimates it will collect $201 million in the current fiscal year from FASTER; $126.9 million would go to the Road Safety program and $50.2 million to the Bridge Enterprise Fund. The remaining $24.3 million comes from a flat $2 daily fee on car rentals and is divided among the two programs.

The bridge fee increases over three years, and the state estimates by 2012 FASTER will raise $250 million a year in new funds for road safety and replacement of poor-rated bridges.

FASTER, which stands for the Funding Advancements for Surface Transportation and Economic Recovery Act, represents the first new revenue to be plugged into Colorado’s transportation infrastructure financing plan since the last time the state gas tax was raised in 1992.

Even so, and even though a statewide panel identified the need for a minimum of $500 million additional per year just for the state to catch up to deferred transportation maintenance, a number of critics want to scale back the fee. And a citizen initiative seeks not only to eliminate it, but to reduce the long-standing auto registration fee – the second-largest source of highway funding in the state – to a cap of $10 per vehicle.

One certain bill in the legislature is a proposal from Sen. Al White, R-Hayden, to scale back the late fees in the FASTER bill, which have been a source of many complaints from people who have had to pay up to $100 for being late registering such things as seasonal-use trailers and other non-motorized vehicles.

State officials were surprised when late fees, raised from $10 to $25 per month for up to four months, amounted to a much higher total figure than projected – but not as surprised as the people who ended up having to pay them. White’s proposal would reduce the fee back to $10 flat and reinstate the authority of county clerks to waive them.

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, assuming a lot of other things are also in place such as historical, architectural or some other significance as well. I’m over 50, but the shape I’m in I have no architectural value!

But 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.

It has maps of 13 freeway and 19 major arterial street corridors throughout the DRCOG region, color-coding those parcels with structures built in 1964 or earlier and located within a one-mile distance of the corridor. The only county from which GIS info wasn’t obtained was Jefferson, and that leaves a gaping hole in the doughnut.

Now, the fact that a property is highlighted on the map not mean that it is eligible for preservation. In fact, most are not and never will be. A huge number of the parcels are those of single-family homes across the metro areas many diverse neighborhoods built before 1964. Using 1964 as the stop-date gives the report a shelf life of five more years, but with the digitized data on hand it can easily be updated.

DRCOG staff had to take all of the GIS data from the various counties and reorganize it into a format that allowed them to combine them into a single data base with all of the same data fields.

The report, “Mapping Inventory of Potential Historic Parcels in the Denver Region,” is available online here. It’s a huge file, 26.5 MB, so it will take a while to download depending on the speed of your connection.

It’s easy to see from the regional map on page seven of the 41-page report what the extent of urban development was in 1964. The parcels that were built on at that time are concentrated around central Denver, close-in Adams County, Aurora along Colfax Avenue, Littleton, Englewood and some other inner suburbs.

Parcels that are old enough for historic evaluation in the Denver metro area -- minus Jefferson County's data -- are shown on this DRCOG map.

The 32 maps of freeway and arterial corridors call out only those parcels within the two-mile swath of each roadway.

The report doesn’t list the parcels that already have local, state or National Register historic status. It’s not meant to. It shows the parcels that should be evaluated for eligibility, however.

The requirement to consider the impact of federally funded transportation improvements on them stems from the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, which set the criteria for preservation. Federal funds cannot be spent on a project without considering the impacts on these properties. That’s what drives the usefulness of the data that DRCOG has published.

A few things I gleaned from the report:

The slot for the vertical stabilizer on Ideal Basic's Fairchild F25 can be seen at the top of the hangar doors.

It’s located five blocks north of Colfax Avenue at Central Park Boulevard. It is listed on the city and the state list of historic structures.

Unsurprisingly, the report shows the corridor with the most parcels containing historic structures is East Colfax Avenue through Denver and Aurora, where 37,024 parcels contain structures built up to 1964.

The second-highest number is on the Colorado-Vasquez Boulevard corridor, from Hampden Avenue on the south to where Vasquez merges onto Interstate 76 on the north.

The third-highest number is on the Interstate 25 Southeast Corridor, with 26,591 parcels. It’s unlikely there will be much call on the data for that one, because it was upgraded during the T-REX project and shouldn’t require significant work for many years.

This is what one of the corridor pages looks like in the DRCOG report on potentially historic parcels, this one highlighting the East Colfax Corridor.

If the Jeffco parcels can be added to the data base, it would fill in the significant gaps in the Wadsworth Boulevard Corridor, which may also contain a large number of historic parcels as it goes from Broomfield on the north to C-470 near Chatfield Reservoir on the south.

Other Jefferson County corridors that need to be filled in: the proposed Northwest Parkway toll road, Hampden Avenue Freeway, Sixth Avenue Freeway, Interstate 70 West to C-470, I-70 Mountain Corridor to the Eisenhower Tunnel, which is in the DRCOG region, and the C-470 Corridor.

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.

DRCOG covers all of the Colorado Department of Transportation’s Denver metro Region 6 as well as parts of CDOT’s Regions 1 and 4. CDOT divides the state into six transportation regions for maintenance, operations and regional project planning.

FASTER, passed this year by the legislature, sets an annual Road Safety Fee of $23 for most vehicles. Lighter vehicles pay $16, and heavier ones range as high as $39. There is a second new fee called the Bridge Safety Fee. It is being phased in over three years and started this year at $9 for the average passenger vehicle. Lighter ones paid $6.50 and heavier ones range up to $16. At the end of three years, the bridge fee will range from $13 to $32.

This table shows the fee schedule set under the FASTER Bill to fund transportation road and bridge safety projects.

It has been controversial because of the increased fees combined with strictly enforced late penalties between $25 and $100 that caught some vehicle owners – many who were used to renewing late for their trailers and other seldom-used vehicles – by surprise. Lawmakers may consider some tweaks to that aspect of the law during the next session, but there is also a group planning to circulate petitions to effectively repeal the increases and, in addition, to cut registration fees down to $10.

Auto registration fees – the existing one and the new FASTER fees – all go to transportation system purposes and planners are concerned about the impact that reducing those fees to a nominal charge would do to maintenance and operations, let alone system improvement projects. The state fuel tax, the principle source of transportation funding, has stagnated with inflation in construction costs and better vehicle fuel economy since it was last increased in 1992. In the short term, federal aid has been reduced to 75 percent of what it had been now that the federal transportation spending authorization has expired and a new bill, typically covering six years, is nowhere close to being finalized in Congress.

View US 285 Resurfacing Project in a larger map

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.

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.

You can view the entire list of DRCOG-area projects here. The list contains some projects in Regions 1 and 4 that are outside the DRCOG area, and their values are not included in the $16.5 million total for the DRCOG area.

Factors used by CDOT in selecting projects included roadways with extremely poor pavement conditions or narrow shoulders, and those in need of new or upgraded signals, improved median barriers or cables, and projects to add “Intelligent Transportation Systems” such as variable message signs in hazardous locations.

As an example, one of the projects on the DRCOG list is the Georgetown Hill segment of Interstate 70, where a $350,000 project will add vehicle speed detection sensors on the steep grade to warn traffic upstream when it is approaching a significant slowdown or congestion jam.

In the same area, a $700,000 project will upgrade the median barrier along I-70 from the Eisenhower-Johnson Memorial Tunnels to Bakerville.

The other fee set by FASTER, the portion dedicated to the Bridge Enterprise Fund, goes toward replacement or rehabilitation of poor-rated bridges. CDOT currently has 124 bridges on its system rated as poor. In August, the Colorado Transportation Commission selected 17 of them for repair or replacement with the estimated $63.3 million in first-year FASTER bridge revenues.

FASTER fees, which are being phased in over three years, are projected to produce a combined $252 million a year in bridge and road improvement funds. Still, that is only half the $500 million identified by Gov. Bill Ritter’s Transportation Finance and Infrastructure Panel in 2008 as necessary simply to catch up with basic “fix it first” maintenance needs.

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.

Charlotte, N.C., had a higher ratio, 150-to-1, but its economic output gain was smaller at $22.5 billion annually. That’s because its estimated 20-year infrastructure costs to relieve congestion was just $3 billion.

“If we were able to alleviate the severe congestion in the Denver region, with $10 billion to $15 billion in projects to get rid of the right bottlenecks and open up the tight places, that would unleash economic activity that would generate these amounts,” said Sam Staley, Reason’s director of urban and land use policy.

The study looked at current traffic, transportation improvement plans, population growth projections, current productivity and gross regional production in Atlanta, Charlotte, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Salt Lake City, San Francisco and Seattle. With data from regional planning organizations in each metro area, including the Denver Regional Council of Governments, Reason determined the 25-minute drive boundaries under both predicted congestion and free-flow conditions, then translated the difference into added economic activity.

The purple ring represents tje area from which it takes 25 minutes to reach Coors Field downtown during congested traffic. The yellow ring is the additional area from which the driving time is 25 minutes during free-flow conditions.

For Denver, it looked at the impact of population growth and longer commuting times on five areas by 2030: downtown centered on Coors Field, the University of Denver, Aurora Mall, Lakewood and Denver International Airport. Of those locations, Reason calculated that eliminating severe congestion around the region’s retail centers, exemplified by the Aurora Mall, would yield the biggest economic gains. Enhanced mobility led to economic activity that added $38.5 billion a year to the metro economy and more than $2 billion in annual tax revenues.

That was the highest impact in the study except for Dallas, where eliminating severe congestion around the University of Texas-Dallas engendered $46 billion annually.

“That represents the amount Denver would lose because of increased congestion through 2030,” Staley said. “Denver is losing a fair amount already, in fact, with current congestion.”

Denver’s “Travel Time Index” as determined in a series of studies by the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M University is 1.40, meaning that travel during congested rush hours takes 40 percent more time than during free-flow traffic. That is the third-highest congestion among the eight cities in the study.

The impact of eliminating congestion in Denver’s suburbs was an estimated $14.4 billion in greater economic output. Around the University of Denver, it was $9.3 billion; eliminating congestion around DIA produced $8.9 billion in annual economic output; and for downtown, it was $7 billion.

The study found meager benefits to traffic congestion projects in Salt Lake City and San Francisco, where the cost of improvements outstripped the annual increase in economic output.

The entire report can be viewed at Reason Foundation’s web site.

“Traffic congestion increases costs to American businesses, workers and families,” the report states. “It increasingly takes more time and fuel to get where we want to go, costing us time and money. As traffic congestion worsens, it will significantly undermine the economic competitiveness of U.S. cities and regions.

Authors David Hartgen, Emeritus Professor of Transportation Studies at University of North Carolina-Charlotte, and Gregory Fields, a retired Army officer and a UNC-Charlotte graduate student in transportation, earth sciences and sociology, found that reducing regional traffic congestion can add billions of dollars in productivity and economic output.

“Most major cities will find that wise infrastructure investments that eliminate gridlock and produce free-flowing road conditions will more than pay for themselves by boosting the region’s economy, and thus tax revenues,” the foundation report says.

“Reducing traffic congestion by 10 percent improves productivity by over one percent,” Hartgen said. “One percent may sound small, but in a city like Denver, it can mean tens of billions of dollars in economic gains.”

There is a total of $87.8 billion in transportation project on Denver metro region plans through 2030, according to the Reason tabulation, including $53.9 on highways and $23.4 on transit. But spending $10 billion to $15 billion of it to untangle key congestion points would enable the economic growth.

Conversely, failure to address gridlock would eliminate up to $38.5 billion a year from the metro economy.

“This report shows how important it is to prioritize taxpayer money on infrastructure projects with the best benefit-cost ratios,” said Adrian Moore, Reason’s vice president of research. “If you focus on the projects proven to improve mobility and eliminate traffic jams, your investment will be rewarded several times over. Shorter travel times increase worker productivity, spawn more jobs and help create more shopping, entertainment and dining choices.”

The study also claims that regional productivity increases are more likely in suburban locations than downtowns, while the cost of congestion relief projects is relatively smaller in suburbs.

“An implication of this study is that current transportation plans may be placing too much focus on downtowns,” Reason states. “In mid-sized cities where car use is overwhelmingly predominant the impact of suburban transportation improvements will be particularly effective in spurring regional economic performance. Clearly, the role of suburbs, malls and universities in regional economic performance needs to be more fully explored.”