DENVER | Main Development Thread #7

[mishko27]

Originally Posted by bobg

Becoming a great transit and pedestrian city means striving to build streets like
this on existing stroads, and when needed going underground on narrow right of ways to preserve valuable streetscapes like this.

It does not mean spending several billion dollars more than the B line to Boulder/Longmont so you can build a subway that will likely have similar ridership to the Boulder buses. All so you don't disrupt automobile traffic and preserve streetscapes like this.

100% with you. We do not need grade separated rail on Colorado, a streetcar with priority signals would do just fine.

The bus itself on Colorado is not even that big of a problem - take it from someone who rode a LOT of RTD busses as a poor grad school student without a car (I was also born and raised in Slovakia, riding busses all my life, so I don't have the hang ups middle and upper class Americans have about them). The biggest problem was the frequency for me. Corridors like Colorado or Broadway need something with a 10 minute frequency, not 30-60 minute one. I once missed a bus on Colorado by 2 minutes and had to wait 28 minutes for the next one, at 7PM, on a weekday.

[jhwk]

Originally Posted by mishko27

100% with you. We do not need grade separated rail on Colorado, a streetcar with priority signals would do just fine.

The bus itself on Colorado is not even that big of a problem - take it from someone who rode a LOT of RTD busses as a poor grad school student without a car (I was also born and raised in Slovakia, riding busses all my life, so I don't have the hang ups middle and upper class Americans have about them). The biggest problem was the frequency for me. Corridors like Colorado or Broadway need something with a 10 minute frequency, not 30-60 minute one. I once missed a bus on Colorado by 2 minutes and had to wait 28 minutes for the next one, at 7PM, on a weekday.

I think the low ridership of the existing bus line shows that while Colorado is an attractive corridor for car trips, it is not attractive for transit. There are much higher ridership bus lines that would be better candidates for rail or BRT (other than Colfax & Broadway, Wadsworth and Leetsdale are the next two highest ridership bus lines).

[gopokes21]

Originally Posted by bobg

Becoming a great transit and pedestrian city means striving to build streets like
this on existing stroads, and when needed going underground on narrow right of ways to preserve valuable streetscapes like this.

It does not mean spending several billion dollars more than the B line to Boulder/Longmont so you can build a subway that will likely have similar ridership to the Boulder buses. All so you don't disrupt automobile traffic and preserve streetscapes like this.

Yeah, I would support some targeted tunneling rather than full subway (ie., Speer under 8th/Broadway/Lincoln). Look my advocacy has nothing to do with wanting a "subway system" for the sake of it. It's just the practicality of serving Cap Hill, Cheesman, Cherry Creek, Glendale (the latter of which should be easier at-grade). Basically the whole diagonal from Union Station down to 25/Colorado which by the way, is where 90% of the pedestrians in Denver are.

There is no way you're doing to barrel through Cap Hill at-grade. It's just a fact. And until we serve that critical neighborhood, which is Denver's densest and most affordable neighborhood (equity??) then you will continue to have old clunkers parked on every square inch of outdoor space, basically ruining the neighborhood and making corner visibility extremely unsafe. We need transit people in Cap Hill will frequently use, and the #10 isn't cutting it. Pre-pandemic I took the #10 every day and was thankful I got on at Colorado, because it couldn't even stop to pickup more people inside of Downing, but then I was screwed in the evening because it would already be full passing Broadway. Buses don't work for neighborhoods as urban as Cap Hill, but sure it's fine for a context like Colorado or Federal.

To say it would have similar ridership to an existing bus line, though, is insane. You're talking about the most meaningful connection through the bullseye of density, jobs, attractions, retail, and dining. Cherry Creek Shopping Center alone has thousands of low-wage workers, WHO WE NEED TO BETTER SERVE. We don't have a single fixed transit line serving existing neighborhoods, so why don't we actually give that a try?? Comparing it theoretically to a bus line through a buffalo preserve??

The fact of the matter is Denver has spent $7 billion on FasTracks and Union Station and is only getting more and more auto-dependent. Density is actually soaring in the city as you have a roughly 100 square mile city (excluding DIA, 153 sq mi with DIA) where the population has gone from 554,000 in 2000 to 715,000 in 2020. There's always another 20-30,000 units in the pipeline, and Denver isn't annexing land. Why can't we seem to make meaningful progress on this like other peer cities like Seattle or Portland? What if we stopped treating density (pre-existing or potential) like some kind of cancer in Denver??

(brace for internet people to ignore this and cite old density stats that include the airport)

[bunt_q]

Originally Posted by gopokes21

Buses don't work for neighborhoods as urban as Cap Hill, but sure it's fine for a context like Colorado or Federal.

Buses have been working for Cap Hill for decades. And Cap Hill is effectively a zero growth area. I am not sure that is where I think we should be putting our transit dollars, versus in areas that can (or least, will) still accommodate the next generation of growth in Denver.

Do you understand how transit governance works in Denver, and why we keep drawing distinctions at the City/County line? (You pulled Austin in - again, more regional tax base.) RTD is a trainwreck and Fastracks was largely a waste, I do not think you'll get much disagreement here. Nobody here is loudly advocating for finishing the B-line - but it is an albatross around the neck of our regional transit agency that cannot be ignored. It's actually really difficult (read: impossible) to take a regional agency with a Board spread over an area bigger than some states, and focus that tax base into Denver-centric transit. And it is a much, much harder discussion when you have to do it with the City alone. You are conflating apples and oranges and trying to make a point that I think most of us already agree with. But most of us have also been having this conversation for 20 years, and are more interested in having it if there is some notion of 'how can this be implemented' as part of the conversation. Does that conversation including 'settling' for what we can afford? Obviously, that is the real world. It doesn't mean that sort of incrementalism can't have value, and materially improve transportation (and arguably by extension, land use) in our City. (Note I did not say region. The City vs. region dynamics are real and can't be ignored here. I can't speak to how that compares to similar regional dynamics in Seattle, but I don't live in Seattle - I know the problem set we are dealing with here. Although, it wasn't all that long ago that we mocked Sound Transit as a joke agency that hadn't accomplished anything, and RTD was the golden child. In a lot of ways, they had the luxury of learning from our mistakes.)

You think many of us haven't studied, at length - with professional resources brought to bear - how to implement transit on the exact corridor you're talking about - Downtown to Cherry Creek to Colorado? We have. If it was easy, it would be done. But the balance of cost, ridership potential, and political will, is a tough equation to balance.

I guess to summarize - most of us are not disagreeing with you. We just know more about it than you, and it's really damn difficult to do.

Edit: Agree 100% with bobg's post.

[bunt_q]

Originally Posted by laniroj

We can continue creating these sterile environments with really nice buildings but a generally poor pedestrian experience or we can radically shift our thinking on planning and shrink roads, shrink right of ways, and allow the human experience to take precedent over cars and trucks.

Stating the obvious here, but this is going to remain difficult until we have decent transportation alternatives in place. (The East Side planning process - and the never-ending chicken and egg conversation, made this apparent.) That is why the BRT conversation is so important. If we are going to upend three generations of how people view land use in the U.S., including Denver, we are probably not going to do that in a single revolution (sorry Bernie bros). Good BRT is the transitional transit solution that (a) works, (b) can be implemented affordably at the scale we need - many, many miles of it, to (c) allow the land use revolution to occur. And it isn't a check-and-egg problem, in my mind. The land use has to come first, I think; in today's world, and how we fund transportation, transportation always lags. So after our land use revolution, then, and only then, might fancy grade separated rail make sense. (Or maybe not - maybe BRT-done-right is something people actually like. If I lived in Lima, Peru, I wouldn't be agitating for rail, probably, because that bus is great to ride. I'd want more BRT before I'd want to waste money converting BRT I liked into something else.) In any case, we don't have the City we need, today, to justify it. So our focus needs to be on how we build that City. Widespread (good) BRT enables that.

[SirLucasTheGreat]

I really would love to see an explosion of BRT service but it seems that RTD has some fundamental budgetary/service quality issues that I think push a lot of people into cars. I think it is hard to find another metro area under 5 million people that has as large of a passenger rail system as Denver. However, we have some of the nation's highest fares, low frequency services, and the cost benefit analysis does not favor using transit for many people. If you could get a regional RTD pass for $50 to $80/month, I feel like the numbers would work out for substantially more people. Another issue, which the pandemic has only exacerbated, is that we don't seem to have all that consolidated of a downtown commercial core compared to other towns. A lot of people commute to DTC, Centennial, Lone Tree, etc... The percentage of commuters that need to travel to Union Station or 16th and California does not seem as substantial as I would like for it to be in an ideal, Sim City world. Is there a policy solution for revitalizing downtown into a larger commuter destination or is that world a thing of the past at this point?

[Sam Hill]

Originally Posted by gopokes21

The fact of the matter is Denver has spent $7 billion on FasTracks and Union Station

No, that was RTD, not Denver.

Denver couldn’t possibly come up with $7 billion to spend on anything. And RTD can’t expect the region it serves to provide billions to spend on new infrastructure that will only serve Denver. This is where we’re stuck. We’ve been over this and over this. This conversation has been had many times over the years.

[bunt_q]

Originally Posted by SirLucasTheGreat

Is there a policy solution for revitalizing downtown into a larger commuter destination or is that world a thing of the past at this point?

Lots and lots of articles about this in the transit world. RTD isn't even the worst off - plenty of commuter rail-only agencies that do not know what to do. What the heck is the future of the Metra system in Chicago, now, for example, if your daily commuter totals are down by 40-60% per day in a hybrid-work world?

Interestingly, the road traffic patterns are different now too - different peaks, lower peaks, but more of them and more spread out. In some ways, we are getting more traction out of our highway lane-miles than we were before the pandemic. But it actually makes the car-vs-transit trade-off different too. It's easier to drive on the 2-3 days/week a person still does it; 40-60% drop in parking demand makes that cheaper too; etc. COVID and hybrid work have realized the dreams of every transportation-demand-management program ever by flattening a lot of the peaks.

[wong21fr]

Originally Posted by bunt_q

Lots and lots of articles about this in the transit world. RTD isn't even the worst off - plenty of commuter rail-only agencies that do not know what to do. What the heck is the future of the Metra system in Chicago, now, for example, if your daily commuter totals are down by 40-60% per day in a hybrid-work world?

Interestingly, the road traffic patterns are different now too - different peaks, lower peaks, but more of them and more spread out. In some ways, we are getting more traction out of our highway lane-miles than we were before the pandemic. But it actually makes the car-vs-transit trade-off different too. It's easier to drive on the 2-3 days/week a person still does it; 40-60% drop in parking demand makes that cheaper too; etc. COVID and hybrid work have realized the dreams of every transportation-demand-management program ever by flattening a lot of the peaks.

Seems as if the commuting trends, assuming that this is what they look like going forwards, screams for RTD to implement their system optimization plan in an expedited manner. Given it's focus on around-the-clock service frequency, albeit on a regional level, it makes sense to get the 15-minute service frequency rolled out on the core routes asap. 18 hours of 15-minutes is a start, though it needs to be 24 hours and 10 minutes in the next five years or so.

Get 'da bus locked down, make some incremental improvements, and maybe in another 20-25 years we can talk some rail additions.

Still waiting on the drop in parking rates- it's currently cheaper for me to take the train downtown rather than parking anywhere including the sketchy Arapahoe Square lots.

[mhays]

Since Seattle came up, I'll chime in. We use multiple agencies and multiple funding levels.

Sound Transit handles light rail and long-distance buses in the developed parts of a three-county area. The challenge is that investments need to match tax revenues in subareas, and that's proving to be inadequate for a well-designed version of the upcoming round of expansions, including a decent version of a tunnel through Downtown. To address this, the state legislature just gave ST the ability to run additional funding measures for specific subareas, but really for Seattle itself. So we'll have a measure pretty soon and it'll pass.

Metro Transit operates in King County, the closest 2.3m. It handles local buses and a little streetcar service. The county provides better service than the other counties. Also, Seattle voters augment the county funding with additional funding for in-city routes.

This might be a good approach for Denver. Maybe a Fastrax2 plus additional in-city revenues?

[DenverInfill]

Originally Posted by mhays

Since Seattle came up, I'll chime in. We use multiple agencies and multiple funding levels.

Sound Transit handles light rail and long-distance buses in the developed parts of a three-county area. The challenge is that investments need to match tax revenues in subareas, and that's proving to be inadequate for a well-designed version of the upcoming round of expansions, including a decent version of a tunnel through Downtown. To address this, the state legislature just gave ST the ability to run additional funding measures for specific subareas, but really for Seattle itself. So we'll have a measure pretty soon and it'll pass.

Metro Transit operates in King County, the closest 2.3m. It handles local buses and a little streetcar service. The county provides better service than the other counties. Also, Seattle voters augment the county funding with additional funding for in-city routes.

This might be a good approach for Denver. Maybe a Fastrax2 plus additional in-city revenues?

Thanks, honorary Denver-thread member mhays for your always-insightful comments! Something needs to give because our one-size-fits-all transit agency covering an area of 1000+ square miles with a board elected from geographic districts just isn't working.

[TakeFive]

Except From Me Of Course

Originally Posted by bunt_q

RTD is a trainwreck and Fastracks was largely a waste, I do not think you'll get much disagreement here.

Outside of DIA, FasTracks was the best investment in transportation ever with respect to the Denver/Metro area.

Without FasTracks there is no half-billion $ investment in Union Station; there is no A Line; there's no $2 Billion in RE investment in the DUS neighborhood and 38th and Blake Street is not a hot spot. If you were to bid DUS today you'd probably being looking at closer to $2 billion.

FasTracks put Denver on the map attracting Millennials in droves and RE investors to house them like never before in the history of Denver.

Fast Forward and the 5.5 mile extension through the Phoenix Barrios will cost about 3 X as much as the first 20-mile light rail project which opened in 2008 and cost $70 million per mile. That is the exact same cost for FasTracks including both new light rail and commuter rail, all of the new maintenance facilities, hi-tech security Plus the Flatiron Flyer, etc.

Over time FasTracks will be seen as a stroke of genius.

[bunt_q]

Originally Posted by TakeFive

Without FasTracks there is no half-billion $ investment in Union Station; there is no A Line; there's no $2 Billion in RE investment in the DUS neighborhood and 38th and Blake Street is not a hot spot. If you were to bid DUS today you'd probably being looking at closer to $2 billion.

FasTracks put Denver on the map attracting Millennials in droves and RE investors to house them like never before in the history of Denver.

Do you actually believe this? The development around DUS had nothing at all to do with the transit. Combine the right zoning, the right timing, and you could've put a food hall and hotel in that historic station, totally sans transit, and the development potential would've been exactly the same. If you go in Union Station today, it's everything the owners can do to keep as few transit riders in there as possible to ensure that station continues to be "Denver's living room."

Also, millennials have been going to a half dozen other cities just like Denver, with no Fastracks at all. Completely unrelated.

Look, I was as big of a Fastracks supporter as anybody. I still have my opening day Southwest Line poster on the wall in my living room (I ran the Evans station on opening day). I still think it has been an abject failure as a transportation project.

As a real estate project - I think transit gives local jurisdictions a safe excuse to upzone. But apart from that rather dumb (and rather expensive) excuse to do what policymakers should be doing anyways, the transit itself is irrelevant in cities like Denver. (Market driven parking ratios adjacent to transit that are as high as non-transit adjacent projects a bear this out.)

[TakeFive]

Welcome to the Smart Phone generation

Originally Posted by SirLucasTheGreat

I really would love to see an explosion of BRT service but it seems that RTD has some fundamental budgetary/service quality issues that I think push a lot of people into cars.

Over the last month I've worked my ass off (for a mid-70's guy) driving people wherever they need to go.

I've been to the barrios, the ghettos and every socioeconomic neighborhood there is including the gated & guarded communities in North Scottsdale.

Sunday evening I picked up the nicest young ladies (who happened to be black) from the new downtown Fry's (ie Kroger store) and loaded up the back of my CR-V with groceries and balloons (somebody having a birthday) and drove them south (of the tracks) to their affordable housing. Later on I circled back around to the same 'hood, picked up a Euro-immigrant and drove him to his 'night shift' job at Home Depot. He's been there two years and clearly proud to have a good job including benefits.

Point Being

I'd guess 95% of the people in Phoenix (or Denver) either don't live near transit or there job isn't near transit. If they don't have a car (many do) then rideshare provides them access to good jobs or just to run errands. I've also loaded up laundry and if rideshare enables people to get their clothes cleaned then God Bless em.

Welcome to the Smart Phone generation

where time and convenience is just as important to poor people as rich people. Some people spend their money on Starbucks while others spend it on rideshare to get back and forth to work.
-------------------

Originally Posted by bunt_q

Do you actually believe this?

I believe everything I said but we can agree to disagree.

[TakeFive]

Well Stated

Originally Posted by bunt_q

Interestingly, the road traffic patterns are different now too - different peaks, lower peaks, but more of them and more spread out. In some ways, we are getting more traction out of our highway lane-miles than we were before the pandemic. But it actually makes the car-vs-transit trade-off different too. It's easier to drive on the 2-3 days/week a person still does it; 40-60% drop in parking demand makes that cheaper too; etc. COVID and hybrid work have realized the dreams of every transportation-demand-management program ever by flattening a lot of the peaks.

Yes and No

Originally Posted by DenverInfill

Thanks, honorary Denver-thread member mhays for your always-insightful comments! Something needs to give because our one-size-fits-all transit agency covering an area of 1000+ square miles with a board elected from geographic districts just isn't working.

First of all Seattle is uniquely and very different from Denver for a number of reasons which would make for an interesting discussion but too long to explore here.

Bus routes (as well as rail routes) although they serve the suburbs, mostly benefit the City of Denver, specifically the city center and always have. Prior to 2008, nobody lived downtown and the light rail was designed to allow commuters access to downtown and Take Cars of the Road.

Nothing is preventing the city and county of Denver from raising money for whatever they wish to accomplish. But this goes to much of what bunt was explaining.

For the record Sam Hill takes the 'Best Comment of the Day' on the topic.

So much of the current conundrum has resulted from the Pandemic and changes bunt discusses above so it's currently very difficult to know what the best strategies should be.

The good news is that AFAIK RTD's budget is nearly $750 million (or it was) of which two-thirds of it comes from sales and use taxes. That's a helluva good start.

[TakeFive]

Have I ever said that Context is Everything?

Originally Posted by bunt_q

Do you actually believe this? The development around DUS had nothing at all to do with the transit.

Also, millennials have been going to a half dozen other cities just like Denver, with no Fastracks at all. Completely unrelated.

If you go back to the time of the Great Recession those with boatloads of cash for development started with coastal cities before they started looking around.

Going back to 2010 the hot topic and buzz among national developers was investing in urban areas with transit. It was called TOD. Whether deserved or not, Denver got a lot of buzz out of FasTracks and DUS; this appealed just as much to Millennials at that time. That's not to say that every Millennial who moved to Denver was b/c of FasTracks. Many moved to Denver b/c they liked the mountain and skiing - but that doesn't change the primary driver.

What might have, could have, would have eventually happened 'sans Fastracks' is merely speculative. DUS attracted developers from coast to coast specifically due to FasTracks-DUS.

Originally Posted by bunt_q

Also, millennials have been going to a half dozen other cities just like Denver, with no Fastracks at all. Completely unrelated.

Like where (with a timeline of 2010 - 2015)?

The only examples that come to mind would be Austin and that was due to they're being the hot new tech town and maybe the RTP in No Carolina for the same reason. Denver prior to 2015 was not seen as a hot tech town but considered okay for tech.

[SirLucasTheGreat]

Glad that Candi lost Union Station during redistricting last night. Maybe something might actually be done about it now

[mhays]

The concept of multiple coincentric funding sources seems VERY applicable to Denver. The whole metro won't contribute enough to the core area, and the city itself doesn't have enough tax base. It sounds like you need the combination.

(And thanks for your comment Ken!)

[TakeFive]

And the other side of the coin

Originally Posted by coolmandan03

Can you explain more about this? I've already paid $2,500 to have my sidewalks fixed because I was in the first zone to require it (and the city came and did it and sent me the bill). Now the city is looking to charge everyone to fix everybody else? So I get to pay all of mine and other folks?

Originally Posted by wong21fr

Yep. And those of us who live in metro districts that paid for infrastructure will have to subsidize other areas of the the city that have avoided their responsibility.

A $100 per household doesn't seem unreasonable. The problem is that this would be on top of everything else that has been approved by voters in recent years.

There's a way that this could be finessed. Instead of having a 'forever' tax, set a window of (say) ten years. It's much easier psychologically to approve something that sunsets - and won't go on forever.

[bunt_q]

Originally Posted by TakeFive

And the other side of the coin




A $100 per household doesn't seem unreasonable. The problem is that this would be on top of everything else that has been approved by voters in recent years.

There's a way that this could be finessed. Instead of having a 'forever' tax, set a window of (say) ten years. It's much easier psychologically to approve something that sunsets - and won't go on forever.

For comparison, a 10 year fee would only buy you about one-fifth of what a 30 year fee would buy you.

And truncating the fee at all would make it impossible (or at least, really dumb) to "take back" legal liability from owners, because there'd be no permanent source of dollars for ongoing maintenance (which is what the fee is supposed to do), as opposed to just upfront construction. To me, as a voter, the best story is knowing that the sidewalk will no longer be my problem. Absent that, you'd be left with the Los Angeles story. For those of you who aren't familiar with what LA did, they took back sidewalk responsibility on the back of a large-ish federal grant for sidewalk repair. They ran out of money, of course, and got dinged with a couple billion dollar ADA lawsuit and I believe had to unwind the whole thing. (No good deed goes unpunished, I suppose - total disaster.) There isn't a lot of in-between on stuff like this; there's a good reason why the City has avoided the problem entirely for so long.

By the way, wong, your metro district only paid to build that stuff once. (The price you pay for new construction!) It'll still break someday, and I am pretty sure your metro district (or master) isn't going to be out re-building your sidewalks 50 years from now. They're going to need every penny of that O&M mill levy to pay for the holiday lights and maintenance on all of that damn landscaping.