DENVER | Transportation Thread

[SnyderBock]

It won't hold it up at all, because all their arguments are actually false and can easily be proved as such.

[Wizened Variations]

I believe that light rail and commuter train station system, as well as the connection of heavy rail through Denver to be a configuration which will be VERY strongly criticized within 20 years.

The design was crafted during an era of cheap land, and, large real estate consortiums that was based upon 1990 style American downtown revitalization schemes which axiomatically defined public rail transportation as a) cute- little, pretty street cars moving svelte bicycle commuters in tights, b) as downtown jewelry for picturesque high rises, and, c) as shuttles between inner suburb parking lots and sports venues.

This compares to many of the rest of the world's Denver sized cities viewing public rail transporation primarily as a means to move huge numbers of people fairly quickly. The Japanese, Germans, Chinese, Koreans, French, South Africans, Algerians, Turks, Spanish, have recently built, or are building efficient heavy rail systems which move people in the 25,000 - 100,000 people per hour range.

What is involved in moving large people on steel rails has been known for a hundred years: numbers of through tracks, dedicated right of way, condition of infrastructure, dwell times in stations, traffic control, and equipment. Various nations have built such systems used differing financing approaches, which vary from outright federal financing to the Japanese model of private lines and real estate hybrids.

If you build a fast system-i.e., not absolute velocity, but average velocity, and, make access into, and, through downtown quick and easy, THE SKYSCRAPERS INEVITABLY WILL COME. (If you are in Toronto, for example, go to the top of the CN tower and look at how the buildings FOLLOW the Bloor Street and Young Street lines. The vast majority of the buildings were constructed after the TTC subway lines were completed.)

The Union Station plan, and, the associated real estate development schemes thus are off base. The issue is NOT UNION STATION: the issue is being able to get 100,000 people an hour into and out of downtown.

Move the heavy rail tracks north, condemn a few silly buildings that prevent laying a couple of extra tracks south and north, put a shed over the combined light rail and heavy rail interface and viola! you have half the train stations in Japan! (And they ARE efficient.)

Get that done, and, you will see 50 fifty story buildings in downtown Denver within 20 years. And a couple of 80 story buildings too!

(Sorry to dream. Got to catch the cute choo choo and trundle downtown and pretend Lodo is world class)

[sashyenka]

^I see your point, but the tone is such that I want some of whatever you're smoking.

[wong21fr]

Wizened Variations,

Any chance you decided to sue the Union Station Revedelopment last week?

[Fritzdude]

Originally Posted by Wizened Variations

I believe that light rail and commuter train station system, as well as the connection of heavy rail through Denver to be a configuration which will be VERY strongly criticized within 20 years.

The design was crafted during an era of cheap land, and, large real estate consortiums that was based upon 1990 style American downtown revitalization schemes which axiomatically defined public rail transportation as a) cute- little, pretty street cars moving svelte bicycle commuters in tights, b) as downtown jewelry for picturesque high rises, and, c) as shuttles between inner suburb parking lots and sports venues.

This compares to many of the rest of the world's Denver sized cities viewing public rail transporation primarily as a means to move huge numbers of people fairly quickly. The Japanese, Germans, Chinese, Koreans, French, South Africans, Algerians, Turks, Spanish, have recently built, or are building efficient heavy rail systems which move people in the 25,000 - 100,000 people per hour range.

What is involved in moving large people on steel rails has been known for a hundred years: numbers of through tracks, dedicated right of way, condition of infrastructure, dwell times in stations, traffic control, and equipment. Various nations have built such systems used differing financing approaches, which vary from outright federal financing to the Japanese model of private lines and real estate hybrids.

If you build a fast system-i.e., not absolute velocity, but average velocity, and, make access into, and, through downtown quick and easy, THE SKYSCRAPERS INEVITABLY WILL COME. (If you are in Toronto, for example, go to the top of the CN tower and look at how the buildings FOLLOW the Bloor Street and Young Street lines. The vast majority of the buildings were constructed after the TTC subway lines were completed.)

The Union Station plan, and, the associated real estate development schemes thus are off base. The issue is NOT UNION STATION: the issue is being able to get 100,000 people an hour into and out of downtown.

Move the heavy rail tracks north, condemn a few silly buildings that prevent laying a couple of extra tracks south and north, put a shed over the combined light rail and heavy rail interface and viola! you have half the train stations in Japan! (And they ARE efficient.)

Get that done, and, you will see 50 fifty story buildings in downtown Denver within 20 years. And a couple of 80 story buildings too!

(Sorry to dream. Got to catch the cute choo choo and trundle downtown and pretend Lodo is world class)

I'm assuming the bulk of this post was copied from some other publication - perhaps and would be curious to see the link to it. However, I'm under the impression that Union Station will be able to handle 250k people per day, which seems fairly substantial to me. Granted, it's not going to set the bar in train travel, but I don't think Denver will ever rival Tokyo, Beijing, Seoul, or most of continental Europe in terms of ridership demographics since it's not in our culture. Regardless, I'm excited about the current plans - especially when I compare it to the nowhereland and 99% car culture that Denver was just 15 years ago.


Going forward, I'm hoping to see more residential and buisiness entities tie into the "grid" to make travel more accessible by choo choo trains - such as universities, hospitals, sports stadiums, DIA, and more Transit Oriented Design "live/work" development sites.

Besides - it's not like it's impossible to add more "through-lines" through Union Station. It'll just take some underground sections or additional lines that run adjacent to the current heavy rail line - which is still a viable option - even though it's not in the plans as of yet. But, in 20 years, it might be.

[SnyderBock]

I don't understand what you mean by moving the commuter rail lines north a little bit. The current planned alignment is the optimal alignment. Extensive Environmental Impact Studies (EIS) have evaluated alignment options and determined these planned alignments to be optimal. No single individuals opinion on the matter, or even any group of people whom have not conducted and prepared a study as extensive as the EIS, simply do not have the knowledge, data or grounds to make any legitimate counter proposal.

If any group has conducted as extensive of a study as the EIS's and do have a viable counter-proposal to push, the time for pushing such a plan has long since passed by. There was a very sufficient period of time for any groups to make such proposals during the EIS process. So your points are not only invalid, uninformed, bias but also too late.

Despite your claims, the existing Union Station plan and rail alignments are fully capable of accommodating the initial projected 100,000 passenger a day to pass through Union Station, but also future growth well towards 200,000+ people a day. By the time Union Station is at capacity, it will be time for Denver to build it's first subway line. Union Station can obviously have greatly expanded capacity well into the future, via subway platforms well under the exiting build out plan.

Here is how I would propose expanded capacity of a post FasTracks Denver/Union Station/Civic Center Station expansion (AKA: NexTracks).

This NexTracks plan would begin construction in ~25-35 years from now. Civic Center Station would be rebuilt as a vastly below grade (subway) multi-model secondary hub station to counterpart Union Station. All my proposed lines coming into, would enter central Denver by going subway and into Civic Center Station as subway lines. At Civic Center Station, the subway line would merge and continue as a shared 4-track through subway line down 17th Street to Union Station where elevators and escalators from the stub-platforms from this subway line would enter directly into Historic Union Station building.




Here is how the subway platforms under 17th Street would be connected into Historic Union Station
(my subway proposal is on left side of the rendering; to the right of Historic Union Station,
is the planned FasTracks Union Station build out):

[Pizzuti]

250K people taking transit to work in Downtown Denver would be a dream. That's about forty percent of the current population of Denver!

If we ever need to move MORE than 250K people out of Downtown and can't fit them through Union Station, we can always add a second hub.

The total size of Downtown Denver is a lot smaller than Toronto's Downtown or New York's downtown or Tokyo's downtown. I'm not just talking about building height and density, I'm talking about land area. There's only so much space for development that will draw commuters. If we get more than 250K it will be because the CBD and extremely high-density development has expanded far beyond its current boundaries -- the parking lots near Auraria and the Pepsi Center will be built up, the parking lots between Downtown and Five Points will be built up, and Denver's high-rises and office core will be spilling into those districts. In that case it would probably make sense to add a secondary hub in those areas anyway.

[SnyderBock]

Yes Pittuzi,
I think we are seeing it in basically the same way. The Union Station design can handle the initial projected 100,000 passengers a day without any issue. The design can also handle future growth up to 200,000 passengers a day with increased frequency of the FasTracks lines, additional AmTrak service and the addition of Colorado HSR service.

In the main train room, there will now be two unused platforms for future service already in place. At the Light Rail terminal 2-blocks west of the main train room, there will be a reserved space for a future third platform to be built there as well.

So that is space for three new rail lines beyond the FasTracks system, without any major expansion and only minimal construction. That should absorb future growth from ~100,000 passengers a day in 2020, to ~200,000 passengers a day in 2040.

So we are realistically looking at the year 2050 before any future major expansion would be needed to handle increased capacity at and above 250,000 passengers a year. It would be at this point in time that Denver's population density and rail ridership might be high enough to build something simular to my subway proposal above. And my proposal essentially turns Civic Center Station into that subway system hub. So instead of expanding Union Station, we would instead build a second multi-model hub and connect the two hubs with a subway line. Think about a two hub system such as New York's Central Station and Penn Station. A two hub system in Denver for the year 2050 and beyond would be a viable solution.

So I really do not think those who oppose Union Station--because it will not allow for enough future growth--have strong arguments. I think what they are actually saying is that they want all the dense development projects in the Union Station plan, eliminated and leave all the open land, open in case one day Union Station needs to be expanded. Of course, this would significantly increase the amount the tax payers will have to pay for Union Station, by eliminating the private funds helping to pay for it. It also would result in a much less vibrant and less viable district of downtown Denver. I do not believe rail ridership will ever be that high, without the Union Station development fully built out. At some point in time, Denver will need to turn Civic Center Station into a second hub for a future NexTraxt system to compliment the FasTracks system and Union Station.

[Wizened Variations]

To me, the principal mistake of the Union Station and evirons plan, is purely a matter of moving people, and, the solutions to problems of moving large numbers of people on steel rails dates from the early 20th century.

For us, imagine that our transportation system is like a mother board. In the case of a transportation system with Van Neumann like architecture, such as Denver's, the analogy is pretty straight forward: the CPU being Union Station (at least that's the intent), and, the rail and bus lines, the adjuncts hooking into feeder lines that go into Lodo.

A "Van Neumann" type transporation system is keyed to a) how fast the passengers (data packets) arrive at the CPU (Lodo), b)how fast a passenger can change from one train (or bus) to another, c) whether one can stay on the same train while going through Lodo, and d)egress and exit. These four variable groups collectively would be processor speed, bit width, etc.

Essentailly, the central question is how many people can go through the process in the shortest time?

The problem to me, is that not only are we creating a passenger processor in Lodo where the light rail and heavy rail bus lines are seperated by both differing schedules and considerable physical distance, but, that the design will force many billions of additional dollars to be spent to make Littleton, Castle Rock, etc., accessible at a future date via heavy rail.

(Our "brilliant" planners, in the name of power brokers who absolutely believe that we will remain an autocentric nation, narrowed the right-of-way to 5 tracks- two of which are light rail- between 16th and Speer. In addition, and the readers should see this for themselves, via the 16th Steet pedestrian bridge over the tracks looking west, there are at least 4 slow speed curves within the first km!)

My dream solution would be to simply swap land and move the commuter heavy rail lines north to the BNSF lines, insure a 120-150' rail corridor west (and east) have the light rail to their immediate south, and, make the gap between Union Station and the southern most light rail track, the bus station. Loop the light rail stub at the Union Station to meet the 18th Street loop between Stout and Champa that is already there.

Union Station is NOT important: the fast/entry and exit of huge numbers of people is.

And I am talking about 100,000 people per hour via light and heavy rail down the line, which, when combined with another 100,000 via bus would give downtown a 500,000 to 750,000 person per day system (most of the traffic concentrated during rush hours).

If Denver, as I believe, will double in population by 2050, and, if Denver, will have 10-20% of it's households without cars, my vision will still have the metro area, public transportation light.

(Oh yes, many public transportation systems use better systems, such as ring topology..ROFL).

[Wizened Variations]

Dealing with metro area populations. At the very least the inner suburbs as well as Denver. Say, 6,000,000 metro, and 2,000,000 Denver plus inner suburbs, by 2050.

[SnyderBock]

No offense, but your plan is ridiculously bad...

The problem to me, is that not only are we creating a passenger processor in Lodo where the light rail and heavy rail bus lines are seperated by both differing schedules and considerable physical distance,...

As part of the FasTracks plan, all bus and rail schedules will be realigned and synchronized using an advanced mass transit control center. The distance between the Light Rail Terminal (LRT) and the Commuter Rail Terminal (CRT) is not a long distance, being only about 2 city blocks. Plus they will be connected with an underground, environmentally controlled passageway with moving walkways to speed/ease movement. Plus all along this walkway will be bus bays, meaning many transfers will not even require traversing the entire length of the passageway.

In fact, there are less than 10% of all commuters as being projected as actually arriving in Union Station on light rail to make a transfer to commuter/heavy rail or vise-versa.

And if that wasn't easy enough, the fast, frequent and easy to use Free 16th and 18th Street Shuttle buses will run between the LRT and CRT. Are you seeing just how miserably failed your concepts are now? They are total fail.

...but, that the design will force many billions of additional dollars to be spent to make Littleton, Castle Rock, etc., accessible at a future date via heavy rail.

The Union Station design will "force" many additional "billions" to be spent to allow Heavy Rail service to Castle Rock and Littleton? I assume you are talking about the proposed Front Range High Speed Rail, because Littleton is already served by RTD Light Rail and won't need additional Heavy Rail service, EVER. Uh and ah, Castle Rock removed themselves from the RTD district.

So yes, you must be talking about the Colorado HSR project. If you are, your argument is FAIL. Through North-South access into and out of Union Station for regional HSR service is not an issue. There is reserved space for this between the LRT platforms and Consolidated Mail Line (CML) at Union Station.

The issue is actually with east-west through service. It is likely an additional $250 million would have to be spent for elevated rail structures in order to get HSR from the west (Golden, Arvada), into Union Station efficiently. $250 million is a far cry from billions extra. An extra $250 million on a $20 billion HSR regional system would make it cost $20.25 billion instead. And that's assuming this massive, unfunded project ever lands funding and gets built. Once again, major FAIL dude!

[Octavian]

Originally Posted by Wizened Variations

To me, the principal mistake of the Union Station and evirons plan, is purely a matter of moving people, and, the solutions to problems of moving large numbers of people on steel rails dates from the early 20th century.

For us, imagine that our transportation system is like a mother board. In the case of a transportation system with Van Neumann like architecture, such as Denver's, the analogy is pretty straight forward: the CPU being Union Station (at least that's the intent), and, the rail and bus lines, the adjuncts hooking into feeder lines that go into Lodo.

A "Van Neumann" type transporation system is keyed to a) how fast the passengers (data packets) arrive at the CPU (Lodo), b)how fast a passenger can change from one train (or bus) to another, c) whether one can stay on the same train while going through Lodo, and d)egress and exit. These four variable groups collectively would be processor speed, bit width, etc.

Essentailly, the central question is how many people can go through the process in the shortest time?

The problem to me, is that not only are we creating a passenger processor in Lodo where the light rail and heavy rail bus lines are seperated by both differing schedules and considerable physical distance, but, that the design will force many billions of additional dollars to be spent to make Littleton, Castle Rock, etc., accessible at a future date via heavy rail.

(Our "brilliant" planners, in the name of power brokers who absolutely believe that we will remain an autocentric nation, narrowed the right-of-way to 5 tracks- two of which are light rail- between 16th and Speer. In addition, and the readers should see this for themselves, via the 16th Steet pedestrian bridge over the tracks looking west, there are at least 4 slow speed curves within the first km!)

My dream solution would be to simply swap land and move the commuter heavy rail lines north to the BNSF lines, insure a 120-150' rail corridor west (and east) have the light rail to their immediate south, and, make the gap between Union Station and the southern most light rail track, the bus station. Loop the light rail stub at the Union Station to meet the 18th Street loop between Stout and Champa that is already there.

Union Station is NOT important: the fast/entry and exit of huge numbers of people is.

And I am talking about 100,000 people per hour via light and heavy rail down the line, which, when combined with another 100,000 via bus would give downtown a 500,000 to 750,000 person per day system (most of the traffic concentrated during rush hours).

If Denver, as I believe, will double in population by 2050, and, if Denver, will have 10-20% of it's households without cars, my vision will still have the metro area, public transportation light.

(Oh yes, many public transportation systems use better systems, such as ring topology..ROFL).

I'm having a hard time imagining your proposal. Can you draw us a picture?

The one thing that would have been good at Union Station is if we had a through station via Wewatta. But unfortuately . . . that train left the station when the Pepsi Center was built.

[SnyderBock]

I believe he is proposing all the commuter rail and heavy rail trains not use Union Station at all, but instead have their own hub station north of downtown somewhere between River North and the Mousetrap. He is proposing only the Light rail to come into Union Station and for it to come into it's current location behind the historic Union Station. The rest of Union Station would then be devoted to an expanded bus bay station and buses would connect the commuter rail station up north with Union Station. Buses would be used to shuttle people all through the CBD and urban core from these two hub stations.

[arkhitektor]

Salt Lake built its commuter rail / light rail transfer station at the fringe on the city last year because that's where the freight tracks had been re-aligned. (away from the historic train stations) It was cheaper and easier than routing trains closer to the city center, but only a year later, there is talk of building a new "sub-hub" station further north because the current station is so far out of the way for most commuters. If you've got a great historic train depot, use it. Don't make that same mistake that UTA made here and build a new one elsewhere.

[Fritzdude]

http://cityguides.msn.com/articles/cityarticle.aspx?cp-documentid=19621893

"From new light rails to buses with shuttles to the suburbs, these are the best U.S. public transit systems you never knew existed"

Nice to see that Denver made the list.

[drifting sun]

I agree with Wizened Variation's call for maximum efficiency built into the rail/bus infrastructure, but I kind of thought that's what they are trying to do, by using the existing hub of Union Station, which has plenty of potential to meet the needs of growing commuters until the second half of this century. At that point, like Snyderbock proposed, Denver would be (hopefully!) dense enough at its core to consider subway options to augment rail and bus. BTW, Nextracks has a nice ring, are you going to trademark that?

[Wizened Variations]

“Logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools and beacons of wise men”
Thomas H. Huxley (1874)


I am struck by the similarities between computer hardware models of moving data and moving passengers via fixed routes. In both cases units are transported between locations via a “physical topology”, are handled by traffic control schemes (subject to “collision” for example), enter and ext at fixed points, are effected by network speed, network architecture.

The entire Denver light rail and heavy rail build out can easily be visualized as two star topology networks hooked together by a Lodo router which would be designed to a) enable passengers (data) to transfer between different physical topologies –heavy and light rail, b) to enter and exit via the system via an input and output device.

The bus network that keys into the rail system operates much like the internet, where travel routes have multiple alternatives (streets) and more questions concerning “best choice routing”, but are connected to the router via a physical interface (and no, no bus jokes).

Essentially, then, using this analogy, our FasTracks system can be viewed as feeder lines having individual passenger capacities and individual average transit times, hooked into a central location where a passenger makes a choice between individual feeder lines across a transportation protocol boundary.

Of course the public transportation world is more complex than the data transportation world, so the analogy has to be augmented by times necessary for transportation units to move from storage to active use, the time necessary to switch onto a particular track when entering and exiting a station, the time necessary for an train engineer to eat, use the restroom etc. These factors all reduce efficiencies.

This model is what I call the Chicago Model, where commuter lines come into a central series of stations, some of which are separated by a considerable time distance. To get between two rail lines, in most cases, a passenger has to go to downtown Chicago to make the transfer.

The Chicago example, is interesting too, because one station is rather similar to the heavy rail station envisioned in Lodo. The Ogilvie Station is a terminal station with 16 tracks, Train consists are assembled a distance from the station and trains either reverse into, or are driven into, the station. (The exception to this model in Chicago is the Union Station, which has two “through” tracks.)

The passenger capacity of Lodo’s heavy rail station should be approximately one half the capacity of Ogilvie Station in Chicago, not including time differences resulting from switching in and out of the station.

I do not believe that a public transportation system to be built out by about 2020, should have the design characteristics of Chicago’s commuter rail system in 1980. World wide, for a city with a metro population of almost 10,000,000, Chicago’s heavy rail transportation is one of the least efficient in the world. While certainly a better system than poor LA has, Chicago’s system cannot compare with cities such as Osaka, Hong Kong, Santiago, Toronto, or Barcelona, and, should not be a model worth copying.

Instead, have (a least a few) through tracks within the Lodo station (and no, not the tracks to become available in 2025 or later when BNSF and UP get public assistance to relocate east) that looks more like this

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Toronto&oe...79.382401&spn=0.011319,0.018947&t=k&z=16

(Union Station in Toronto)

than this

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s...65,-87.640235&spn=0.005623,0.009474&z=17

Ogilvie Station, Chicago.

Note on both aerial shots how built up areas surrounding the stations are.

This is the degree of vertical development is what the Lodo scheme seeks, and, the expenses of fixing problems later might be as high as 1000% higher in constant dollars.

How about $2 or $3 billion dollars a mile for a subway in 2009 dollars (and $5 to $10 billion dollars per mile in 2030 dollars) to connect Union Station with a second station for south going heavy rail traffic? ?

(The most efficient high volume public rail systems in the world are token ring like circular systems that stop at all stations (token ring like setup, much like the logical structure of the 16th Street Mall shuttle).

IMO, Union Station never has been the issue: improper development has. And, I also believe that our children and grandchildren will truly regret the limitations of the current design, however well intended that design is...

[sashyenka]

This is getting old. I think it's time to stop feeding the troll.

[SnyderBock]

Fair enough bcp posting below me...

[bcp]

relax people...how is that post "anti-transit"...there are some good points in there whether you like the style and sentiment of it all.