Road to future paved with gold — got any?
By Kevin Flynn 
| July 7, 2009 | 7:55 AM
A recent construction zone at University Boulevard and Arapahoe Road. (Photo by Kevin Flynn)
Read more about Colorado transportation at Inside-Lane.com.
Stick around for the next 25 years and you might be in for a big surprise at the different ways you will be able to travel around metro Denver.
And if it happens, the bigger surprise will be how we found a way to pay for it.
Uncounted billions of dollars in transportation projects are on the drawing boards and in the imaginations of thousands of people who, over the course of years, have helped shape a vision of the region’s future transportation network. Here’s just a small sampling of what might be ahead:
- Eight lanes on Arapahoe Road, with a freeway-like interchange at Parker Road.
- Exclusive bus lanes to Brighton.
- Light rail into south Jefferson County along Hampden Avenue.
- New lanes on Wadsworth Boulevard from Broomfield to Southwest Plaza, and maybe even a rail line.
- Two-way toll lanes on Interstate 25 north to Fort Collins.
- Bag-check and airline boarding passes at Denver Union Station for flights out of Denver International Airport.
- Separate express bus lanes down the middle of U.S. 36 from Boulder to Denver, with free access to car pools and toll access for solo drivers.
- A trolley line along East Colfax Avenue from the state Capitol to Interstate 225 in Aurora.
- A completed beltway to connect E-470 and Northwest Parkway to C-470.
- Light rail connecting the Littleton line with the T-REX line by way of C-470.
- High-speed rail access to the mountains along Interstate 70 and paralleling the Front Range urban corridor from New Mexico to Wyoming.
- Easy reach by commuter flight from the Denver area to the far reaches of Colorado.
What’s lacking is a way to pay for all of it.
In planning parlance, these and hundreds more projects fall in or out of a bucket called “fiscally constrained.” Constrained as in, “Here’s what we can pay for.”
The projects that made it into the bucket of available revenue are “fiscally constrained.” The ones that fall outside the bucket are called the “vision plan.”
With the worldwide financial meltdown severely battering the economy, the bucket is getting smaller, and more and more projects are spilling over the sides.
“The whole world has turned upside down in the last year, and we’re wrestling with whether we have to go back in and look at changing it,” Russ George, executive director of the Colorado Department of Transportation, said of the 2035 Statewide Transportation Plan.
“It was all based on what we knew then, based on our revenue streams as they were,” George said. “But now, everything we’re talking about has huge caveats on it because of the revenue situation. It’s hard to say how much of the 2035 plan is fiscally real at this point, even in the constrained plan.
“Until the economy returns, we won’t see any improvement. It’s looking grim, because it’s all driven by prosperity.”
Scrambling for dollars
The situation has policymakers looking in all directions for the next way to restructure transportation financing. Everything is on the table: higher gas taxes, fees, tolls, per-mile charges, congestion pricing, sales taxes and regional transportation authorities.
Experts also are discussing treating transportation like a public utility, similar to water, electricity and natural gas, and letting a board regulate your transportation bill just as the Public Utilities Commission sets utility prices.
Each strategy has built-in problems.
The state gas tax — the traditional user-pay method of raising transportation funding — is shrinking in buying power because it’s a per-gallon amount that hasn’t been raised since 1991. Because of the 1992 TABOR provision, voters would have to approve any hike.
In 1991, a driver who filled up with 15 gallons paid $3.30 to the state for roads. Today, the same driver filling up with 15 gallons still pays $3.30, even though the buying power of the road dollar has shrunk to 41 cents.
Even if the gas tax were increased, it doesn’t address congestion problems. A driver burning that gas at 8 a.m. on I-25 is contributing to more need for highway expansion than the driver burning that gas at 2 p.m.
That’s why there is talk about outfitting all vehicles with global positioning system transponders, so that drivers can pay for roads based on the amount, location and time of day they use them. To address privacy concerns, there is groundbreaking work on a rechargeable, pre-pay GPS system that would let drivers pay their fair shares anonymously.
“The same way we have pre-paid private cell phones that you charge up with cards, you pay in advance and have no privacy concerns,” said Jon Caldara, president of the free-market Independence Institute. “Big Brother doesn’t have to know who and where you are. I certainly don’t want them to know where I am.”
Caldara is a proponent of user-pay transportation and says advances in technology put a fair system for allotting costs within reach.
“My suspicion is within 20 years, we might be at the point where we see that we need to pay for our roads when we use them,” Caldara said. “And the idea of some sort of tolling will be how we pay for our major road building. I can’t imagine how it will happen any other way.”
Don’t be surprised, too, if there is even a high-tech rip-off of the old college ride-board system. Remember posting on your dorm bulletin board that you needed a ride to Kansas City or that you were headed to South Padre Island for spring break and had extra seats?
Digital technology will make it possible for “instant car-pools” to form, says Steve Cook, transportation planning manager for the Denver Regional Council of Governments. Just program in your desired destination, and when a registered user with room in the car gets near your location, the GPS will notify the driver that someone needing a ride is nearby.
25 years of growth
All this is driven by the inexorable march of growth that has Colorado and metro Denver on the verge of gridlocking the urban Front Range as well as mountain corridors vital to the state’s economic health and high quality of life.
“The key background point I always make is, first, to note the assumption that 1.5 million more people will be living here with about a million more jobs to go to,” Cook said.
With the current population around 2.7 million and employment around 1.5 million, that’s 50 percent more people and two-thirds more jobs to get to.
“That’s like adding another Salt Lake City metropolitan area to Denver’s,” Cook said.
Part of Cook’s job is to ride herd on the comprehensive transportation plans for the DRCOG region, which takes in metro Denver and surrounding counties from Douglas to southern Weld, and west to the Continental Divide with Clear Creek and Gilpin counties.
DRCOG’s Metro Vision 2035 plan, a regional cousin of CDOT’s statewide 2035 planning process, contains all the projects that impact how we will get around this town in the future.
Metro Vision includes completion of RTD’s FasTracks program, now mired in cost and revenue uncertainty. Most transportation activists say that the rapid-transit network envisioned in FasTracks eventually will be built out and that planners will be working on the next expansion, informally named NexTracks.
In FasTracks, seven of nine rail corridors radiate from the core of downtown’s Union Station like spokes on a wheel. Six of them touch the region’s circumferential highway, the 470 beltway.
In NexTracks, new lines would begin to connect those outer edges or provide cross-town commuting. The beginnings are already in development.
Part of the approved FasTracks program is a short extension of the Southwest Corridor from Littleton south into Highlands Ranch at Lucent Boulevard, along C-470. NexTracks would take that east along the highway to link up with the T-REX Southeast Corridor along I-25.
All this depends on FasTracks going ahead first.
“Absolutely FasTracks will be built out without reservation, probably by the 2017 time frame,” said Cal Marsella, who leaves this month after 14 years as general manager of the Regional Transportation District. He has taken heat for the problems with FasTracks but thinks a likely vote next year will be successful to raise sales taxes a second time and finish the work.
“People want this program very badly, and whether we can get it done will be answered by fall of 2010,” Marsella said. “We will be way closer to a traditional-type build than we were in 2004.”
Even as a transit proponent, Marsella supports multimodal projects like T-REX, in which RTD partnered with CDOT to reconstruct I-25 through the southeast metro area and extend light rail. But he also supports necessary highway expansions and sees a need to add lanes to C-470, I-25 north of T-REX, U.S. 36 to Boulder and the I-70 mountain corridor, where he also sees transit being built.
“There should be rail there,” Marsella said of I-70 to the Western Slope. “The whole state economy is affected very negatively by that lack of capacity. It’s absolutely critical. The ski areas have no idea how much money they’re losing because people won’t make that drive.”
New plan may take flight
An alternative to driving to the mountains may be found from DIA. Denver Aviation Manager Kim Day said the groundwork is being laid for an increase in air traffic capacity over the Rocky Mountains, thanks to CDOT.
“Currently, ground radar is used in the mountains and there are a lot of places where you can’t see a plane,” Day said. “CDOT is working with the (Federal Aviation Administration) to install computer GPS systems so they have better visibility. It totally increases air capacity. That opens the skies to everyone else.”
Locally, DIA is working with RTD to integrate the FasTracks East Corridor commuter rail project into the airport’s operations.
“Denver Union Station will become a remote terminal for the airport, where you can get your boarding pass and check your luggage. That connection is huge. It takes cars off I-70 and Pena Boulevard and I-225, and opens up capacity,” Day said.
If high-speed rail is developed up I-70 to the mountains, the trains would be able to use the same passenger platforms at DIA, she said.
Airlines also are embracing new technology, she said, to speed up the process of flying. That could make it easier to fly rather than drive around in the future.
“Airlines will constantly improve the speed at which you can navigate an airport,” Day said. “You won’t need a boarding pass, you’ll use your cell phone. They will expedite checking bags. The process of getting from your car to your plane will get much easier.”
The dividing line between how much of this will really be here in 2035 and how much will remain pie in the sky seems to be the size of the bucket from which we have to pay for it all.
Right now, the bucket is more like a kid’s beach toy than a heavy-duty wash basin.
“The sum of it is, I can’t do all you want me to do over the next 30 years with the funds I project I will have,” CDOT’s George said. “What we have done is just try to keep doing things better with what we have.
“But eventually you will begin to perceive the difference. There’s a point of no return with all of this.”
Other resources:
A map charts growth in the metro area from 1940 to 2000.
CDOT’s 2035 Statewide Transportation Plan
DRCOG’s Metro Vision 2035 Corridor Visions
denver international airport, fastracks, highway, light rail, road, taxes, transportation
