Quote:
Originally Posted by taylor23
But what was Denver thinking? Did some other funding fall through or did they assume FasTracks money would pay for the grade separation? It’s not as though we have not known about the East line for some time now.
As for cancelling the NW Line, fortunately I have never heard any RTD official talk about this. The RTD line has always been everything will be completed. Maybe not until 2060 but I do believe it will be done. BRT and Rail to Boulder were part of FasTracks and passed by the voters from the entire RTD region. No way any of it should be canceled.
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Two things here...
On your first point, I think they key thing is that RTD didn't plan to grade-separate a lot of these crossings (to save money, as with everything else in Fastracks), and Denver and Aurora are stepping in trying to find money to make it happen. Different governmental entities, different priorities. The better question is - what was RTD thinking? (I can tell you what they were thinking - they're on a tight budget, and the train comes first, so unless it's an absolute imperative, let the local governments deal with the negative impacts on local traffic.)
On the second point, what RTD puts out in a press release and what RTD staff says behind closed doors, or in a moment of honesty, are plainly two different things. Voters voted for two things - they voted for a proposed system, and they voted for a cap on permissible bonding to construct that system. The two cannot be separated. What the voters voted for is now impossible, so to say we have to get everything we voted for isn't an option. (I'll also point out - RTD put the proposed system out there as a carrot. That was a direct response to the criticisms that torpedoed Guide the Ride in 1997. But nothing that was actually on the ballot promised any particular line would get built. All of that was contingent on later planning processes.)
So, we go to another vote. If it passes, this discussion is pointless. But if the vote doesn't pass, then you can read that as the voters chose the $ bonding cap over the integrity of the complete system. That's the choice. So
if it fails, and it very well could, we'll be looking at cutting things.
Waiting until 2060 isn't an option, because the Fastracks ballot language included
both a percentage tax increase, and a cap on bonding. Without bonding, RTD would be stuck doing pay-as-you-go, and that would make it impossible to finish the system. To say nothing of the fact that the ballot language means once RTD's legal bonding authority is reached and repaid, the tax goes away.
It's not really time to discuss that yet, so it doesn't make press releases. And would be damaging to the efforts to finish Fastracks anyways, so why even go there. But every option now depends on an election. And if that goes badly, our discussion here becomes very relevant, very quickly.
In that case - if we end up making do with what we have, meaning, things have to be cut - I do not think the NW rail should be a priority. (The flipside of that is, in my opinion, the US36 BRT should be near the highest priority - it's about the best performing project in the system, certainly of the ones that are not funded.)
EDIT: Question... if push comes to shove... ignoring the issues with CDOT and getting funding for the highway bit... is there any reason we couldn't pursue New Starts funding for a real BRT system? Focus has been on the North Metro line being the next to go after a FFGA. But if the NW rail went away, at least for now, wouldn't that make a BRT system
very attractive to the FTA? Or is there a built-in anti-BRT bias? I'm not familiar enough with the process to know.
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