Quote:
Originally Posted by bunt_q
We don't want to pay for good design anymore, it's that simple. Stuff costs money, and we hate taxes. And when we do allow limited taxes, they are still constrained by things like TABOR, which makes good planning impossible, because there are too many variable outside our control, and no flexibility on the dollars side of the equation. We're just not politically courageous enough to do good design, because it's not a priority. Things that are priorities? Health care. We get the best results in the world there (for the people who are part of the system). The military. Yeah, if RTD had the kind of money and flexibility that I had in Iraq... well, things would go a lot smoother. But we don't give infrastructure a blank check the way we do some things.
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I think some of the problem(s) too relate to our having forgotten so much of the good transportation planning and design built by private enterprise here from about 1890 to 1930.
Simple stuff: like train stations with express through tracks. High speed tolerant switches, level platforms, etc.
Besides, we in Denver, until very recently, had wide open spaces between the old Gates complex and Commerce City via rail yards.
So our problem was not just lack of bucks, but, also, IMO, a lot of 'Cowtown' hucksterism, something our fair city has been known for, for generations. A kind of provincial ignorance of how the rest of the world works, seems to pervade too many of those of us who actually make the decisions, pick the designers, and, reward our sponsors.
My point is that such design is not complex. Go to Criagslist or EBay and buy a couple of hundred dollars worth of HO rail track (including switches) and play with layout etc.
What the Japanese did, IMO, was put in rail ROW that had priority over road right-of-way. The transportion vehicles themselves in the 20s and 30s were simple, cheap, driven by engineers, and, switches were thrown by hand. After the 'urban renewal' from 1942 to 1945, corrections could be made etc., but, the vast majority of the ROW had already been laid out. Solutions into the middle '60s were simple, low cost, and, efficient.
We, on the other hand, have so much 'graft' that building transportation systems like Fastracks concerns not how efficient the build out should be, but, really, whether anything is built at all. The practiced ability on the part of any small sample of affluent property owners to stop a government (described generically) transportation project dead in it's tracks is both remarkable, and, rather tragic.
I believe that had the money been available in constant dollars to build the entire project out, that the same problems we see today in the SE line, in Union Station, in the Union Station Light Rail line, in the DIA line would still have occurred. The answer to the mediocrity of the transportation package here is not the lack of money, IMO, but that the layout was so awesomely influenced by short sighted money who keenly understood amortization, but, had no real concept of what steel rails transportation can do (like millions of riders on one 4 track line per day and cross town express transport averaging 40 mph or so.)
I have hope however. All that has to happen is for auto transportation cost to exceed a threshold of some kind and public demand will lead to the government (used generically) seizing land and putting in the type of metro transportation system that should have been built in the first place. Of course, IMO, this would require that RTD be disbanded (it is SO INSTITUTIONALIZED and dogmatic), a job corps put into action working 24/7 with both bulldozers and wheelbarrows, etc. Sooner or later (if the population of the metro area continues to both grow and become poorer) working solutions will be built.*
*1,000,000 rail rides per day and 2,000,000 bus rides as a ball park. Maybe 20-25% of the urban traffic. Add another 1,000,000 illegal bus riders and a 500,000 vehicles and you have a Denver with a Metro of 5,000,000 with 2,000,000 or so below the poverty line.
No joke, I am an optimist.
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