DENVER | Transportation Thread

[Cirrus]

Originally Posted by wong21fr

covering the Broadway light rail station... how much would a basic glass/fabric canopy, a manned ticket booth, restrooms, and a convenience booth cost?

That Anaheim ARTIC station was $185 million.

But something like this would probably be $40 million (probably less with a fabric canopy):

[TakeFive]

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Logo Designs by Michael Lawson

Seattle has everything in place to become the next great transit city.

Geography
Seattle geography is ideal. Not unlike San Francisco or other coastal towns it's got those big puddles of water. The various limiting geographic factors make it ideally adaptable for transit.

Bell Cows
Seattle has long been blessed with home-grown companies. Just among the Fortune 500 companies there's Costco, Microsoft, Paccar, Starbucks, Nordstrom, Weyerhaeuser, Expedia and Expeditors International of Washington. If you're not an experienced big rigger then you might not be aware that Paccar sells Peterbilt, Kenworth, DAF & Leyland Trucks. Expeditors is a logistics company.

Every collection of bell cows needs a Lead Dog

Thanks to Amazon, Seattle is now America’s biggest company town
November 30, 2017 By Mike Rosenberg - Seattle Times

Amazon so dominates Seattle that it has as much office space as the city’s next 40 biggest employers combined. And the growth continues: Amazon’s Seattle footprint of 8.1 million square feet is expected to soar to more than 12 million square feet within five years.

I've also read that Amazon is looking at having 10 million SF by the end of 2019; let's go with that number. That is the equivalent of 15 buildings the size of 1144 15th Street. And Amazon is all about being downtown.

Seattle/King Co/Sound transit et al has had their stumbles and bumps over the last decade as any metro area will but two things are notable for me. First they spent a good chunk of money building a tunnel to a key part of town. You know it was money well-spent when ridership climbs 50% within months of opening. Secondly, they went back to the drawing board on the RapidRide routes but the eventual execution and costs have resulted in well functioning routes.

But what really made Seattle the sole Platinum winner?
Any metro the size of Seattle that can convince voters to approve $54 billion in new taxes for future transit investments surely deserves Platinum.

[TakeFive]

Bus Rapid Transit versus Light Rail

Recently I worked by darndest to convince a Phx transit fan, exit2lef, that BRT was the next great thing. Problem was he wasn't buying what I was selling. I think his problem is that like Cirrus he knows too much.

His view is that BRT is NOT train-like, even a little bit like many transit advocates try to claim. One example is the Institute for Transportation & Development Policy pushes that notion. Admittedly Cirrus has mentioned the differences in ride and appeal.

exit2lef asserts that if a corridor is worth substantial investment then it should be in light rail and not BRT. He believes that by the time you spend the money to do BRT the right way and consider the shorter lifecycle of buses, you might as well spend a little more and ride the rails. He has experience riding Boston's BRT as well as Seattle's RapidRide buses and he was disappointed in both cases. There's no question that the average Joe and Juanita and especially choice riders think that light rail is much better than buses.

That's the BRT view from the desert.

[Cirrus]

Your friend is both right and wrong:

1. Light rail *is* substantially better than buses. BRT is absolutely not rail-like and absolutely should not be considered a peer of or permanent substitute for rail. Saying it's rail-like is a counterproductive shortcut that ends up justifiably turning off anyone who likes rail, which is most of the people who support transit in the first place.

2. But fiscal reality being fiscal reality, we cannot build rail everywhere we want to have a good transit line. Sorry.

3. The "good BRT is just as expensive so you may as well do rail" argument only holds water above a level of around 25,000 riders/day. Above that, it's sort of true sometimes, depending on circumstances. Below that, not really.

4. Seattle's RapidRide is not BRT. But it *is* just about the most efficient thing you can do in terms of increased ridership per dollar spent, and it's easy & fast to implement. Every city should absolutely mimic RapidRide on all its major bus lines, starting yesterday. The trick/subtlety to the RapidRide concept is that it's really just doing buses correctly, as opposed to a major investment in new rapid transit. Don't think of it as mutually exclusive with building rail or even with building BRT. Think of RapidRide as the pretty good improvement to existing buses that you can make right away, while you spend the next 20 years planning and funding your big new line (or the next 40, if you're dealing with a corridor that's several spots down your list of priorities).

But you're both asking the wrong question:

The problem with staking out a hard-line position in any "rail vs bus" debate is that a hard-line position presupposes that transit quality is a simple black/white duality consisting of either "good trains" or "bad buses" (or vice versa), and you're stuck with bad buses up until the day your open your train. But the reality is that transit quality is a continuum with a lot of gray in-between the black and the white, and there are many many places where it makes sense to spend the money to be somewhere in the middle of the continuum, rather than all the way at one side or the other.

Everyone instinctively understands that. Because even light rail is just a spot on the continuum, far below the theoretical maglev subways that occupy the extreme high-end of the quality spectrum. And even the most hard-liner rail advocate knows that it's completely impractical to replace *every* bus route with rail. Put in those terms, nobody can argue with the continuum. Unless they're trolls who just want to argue.

So stop making it about BRT vs rail and start making it about finding the spot on the continuum that makes the most sense given the specific technical, political, monetary, and temporal facts for each individual corridor you're dealing with.

[TakeFive]

Originally Posted by wong21fr

Just till we shut off your water. AZ's basically CO and CA's bitch on this one.

Kinda but only in extreme drought conditions.

AZ/Phoenix metro does get a significant amount of water from their own mountain runoff and collection of reservoirs. From the excess of water they have been getting over what is needed they have injected into underground aquifers, over three years worth of water insurance. A lot of their water accomplishments ofc go to politics and significantly to the original Dad Babbitt, Bruce who was a governor and later Secr. of Interior.

Originally Posted by Cirrus

Your friend is both right and wrong:

Well articulated. Here's to continuums.

To be fair what I was really selling was re-imagined green streets combined with BRT. We got off on a BRT v light rail discussion from there.

Of the $16.7 billion in new Phoenix taxes (2015) in Transportation 2050, light rail is to get about $5.8 billion. BTW, this is city-specific and not metro although they will get matching funds from MAG the county-wide metro tax revenue. I was wanting to abscond a portion of that for use on BRT/green streets (more bang for the buck). He never mentioned green streets improvements, not that he was uninterested but clearly unconcerned. He was definitely concerned with preserving every $ designated for light rail.

With respect to bus service he's in favor of enhancing service according to priority routes and as money becomes available to upgrade to new buses, etc. TBH, their bus service is not that robust to worry about all-door boarding etc as a priority just yet. Frequency is being improved and better service overall is planned.

Phoenix is on course to break ground in 2019 on their next light rail segment, a 5-mile trip through the So Phoenix barrios. They are hoping for an FTA grant under the Ladders of Opportunity Transportation Empowerment Pilot (LadderSTEP) program.

[mhays]

Originally Posted by TakeFive

Thanks to Amazon, Seattle is now America’s biggest company town
November 30, 2017 By Mike Rosenberg - Seattle Times

I've also read that Amazon is looking at having 10 million SF by the end of 2019; let's go with that number. That is the equivalent of 15 buildings the size of 1144 15th Street. And Amazon is all about being downtown.

The article is full of it. Amazon isn't the largest office user in Seattle...Microsoft has 14 msf. They were omitting a lot of owner-occupied space (as brokerage reports usually do) and it was only within city limits.

[jbssfelix]

Originally Posted by mhays

The article is full of it. Amazon isn't the largest office user in Seattle...Microsoft has 14 msf. They were omitting a lot of owner-occupied space (as brokerage reports usually do) and it was only within city limits.

How is omitting Microsoft, which is in Redmond, being shady? It's talking about office space in Seattle

[TakeFive]

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Logo courtesy City/County of Denver

Part One

What if Fastracks had never happened?

• There would be no $450 million DUS transit center. Maybe they would have cobbled together money for an above ground bus center?
• There would be no Train to the Planes
• Would investors even have been interested in developing the DUS neighborhood? Certainly it would have been a poor imitation of what it is today.

Looking Back
The transit center project built by Kiewit started in 2010. The W Line had started construction in 2008. By 2011 Denver was pinging on various city ratings as a Top Five City for attracting millennials. Fastracks was a primary driver for Denver's image at that time.

About the same time and following national investors/developers initial surge in coastal cities they started looking around for other attractive cities to invest. The Two Buzz Word things they were looking for was a vibrant urban area (attracting millennials) and transit. No doubt in my mind that without Fastracts and all those millennials that the surge into building apartments (etc) in Denver would have been much slower and half as intense and dense. The pattern of investing in Denver just accelerated from there.

The Return on Investment of Fastracts has been eye-popping

True story
The first three buildings in the DUS neighborhood that were sold went to European investors for all cash: the two wing office buildings and the Cadence apartments. Had transit expert Jon Orcutt from NYC suggested to the buyers they better first check the APTA ridership numbers because they were less than impressive our European friends would merely have smiled and proceeded with their purchases. Interesting 'we Americans' tend to obsess over quarterly results whether with transit or stocks. Europeans in contrast are famous for taking the (very) long view (like decades). They would have looked to the $450 million new transit center, the train to the planes and the obvious energy in developing downtown Denver, smiled and said "Denver has decades to worry about building up the ridership numbers for all the new lines. We like what we see."

Seattle, Austin and Denver
Seattle had Amazon; Austin was the next big thing in tech; Denver had Fastracks. It's just that simple. Over-simplification? Sure just ask the Mayor of each city and they'll give you a laundry list of features. But those three booming metro areas boiled down to one primary driver in each case. For Denver Fastracks was the catalyst that led Denver to be second only to Seattle for number of cranes.

[mhays]

Originally Posted by jbssfelix

How is omitting Microsoft, which is in Redmond, being shady? It's talking about office space in Seattle

I said "full of it" not shady. Many articles reported on this report without differentiating that it was within city limits. Further, as I've pointed out, they didn't catch everything even within Seattle. As a Seattle construction guy I say it's BS.

[TakeFive]

Logo courtesy of RTD

Part two

Time Value of Money

Cirrus is right in the sense it does no good to worry or fret over what you didn't do yesterday or a decade ago. Places like Nashville can only decide what is best to do now and move forward. But that doesn't mean that Denver doesn't get credit for doing what it did when the voters approved FasTracks and it was subsequently built.

I can recall observing various additional work that was being done in conjunction with the W Line. That is when EngiNerd proclaimed that actually the W Line was a drainage project masquerading as a light rail line. There were other types of work done as well. There were 3 street bridge reconstructions and IIRC Sheridan was redesigned and regraded for safety when the new bridge was built. There was also three pedestrian bridges, two light rail tunnels, one pedestrian tunnel and 4.26 miles of bike paths. Except for the projects directly related light rail, presumably all this other drainage and bridge work was on some masterplan to be done and some unknown point in time. Thanks to FasTracks it's now done and at post-recession costs of construction.

This is also true of every line to varying degrees. They weren't just laying X miles of track. Each line included a lot of utility specifically drainage work as well as other misc. improvements. All this infrastructure work is now completed (except N Line) and all of it was contracted on the basis of much lower costs than it would cost today if RTD was just starting.

Not only at lower construction costs but Federal grants payed for half the costs in most cases. While not unusual at the time it's hard to say if that kind of matching funds will be available in the future.

Regardless of any specific numbers of riders at the moment Denver metro can be grateful that they created Fastracks when they did. The Time Value of Money means we are talking about some serious money. A few million here, a few million there and soon we're talking about $billions saved.

[TakeFive]

A simple question

Diving deeper into Nashville's plan for better accuracy and clearer picture I learned that Nashville and the Davidson Co voters who must approve of the plan are one and the same; they merged in 1963. Knowing that, the plan should have a good chance of passing.

Nashville's transit plan includes 5 light rail lines, 4 BRT/Rapid Ride routes and a section of subway. The subway is estimated to cost a little less than $1 billion and is to be 1.8 miles long. The whole plan is estimated at $5.2 billion in 2017 $'s.

Nashville has a reported population of 684,410; Denver has a reported population of 682,545. They are the same size.

Question: What's to prevent Denver from coming up with their own transit plan with a ticket closer to $2.5 billion?

[TakeFive]

MOAR TOD

Evans Station heating up? Developer requests 8-story rezoning
January 29, 2018 by Andrew Kenney/Denverite

A local developer has visions of high-density development on a block that’s currently lined with low-rise warehouses. In a new rezoning application, LCP Development requested permission to build up to eight floors at 2065 S. Cherokee Street, in the Overland neighborhood.

What about zoning?

City plans mark the area for “transit oriented development,” which is the same kind of higher-density areas that are rising up around stations like 38th and Blake. The developer wants the city to designate the land as residential mixed-use

[wong21fr]

Originally Posted by TakeFive

Question: What's to prevent Denver from coming up with their own transit plan with a ticket closer to $2.5 billion?

Sales tax competition from other municipalities for one and the population of Nashville accounting for 1/3 of the metro versus Denver accounting for 1/4- less ability to move the needle in the metro area. Not saying that it's not possible for Denver to float a sales tax increase to fund a transit measure, and it's probably something that will happen in the next couple of years as the transit plan firms up, but it seems like threading the needle in Denver to ensure that retail stays competitive is harder than in Nashville.

[Cirrus]

Originally Posted by TakeFive

Question: What's to prevent Denver from coming up with their own transit plan with a ticket closer to $2.5 billion?

Someone with a better handle on Colorado law can answer this better than I can. But I *imagine* the answer will fall into one of these 4 categories:

1. Existing debt cap. These taxes don't pay for the construction directly, they pay to repay bonds that pay for the construction. Denver can only accrue so much debt, and even with additional revenue it may be near what law and/or bond agencies will allow.
2. Existing TABOR laws, or other state-level restrictions on revenue.
3. Denver somehow having a less healthy/robust tax base than Nashville for one reason or another (could be wong's sales tax thing, although that's not the only scenario I can imagine)
4. Nothing; Denver could do it if the voters approved it.

[TakeFive]

Originally Posted by wong21fr

Sales tax competition from other municipalities for one and the population of Nashville accounting for 1/3 of the metro versus Denver accounting for 1/4- less ability to move the needle in the metro area. Not saying that it's not possible for Denver to float a sales tax increase to fund a transit measure, and it's probably something that will happen in the next couple of years as the transit plan firms up, but it seems like threading the needle in Denver to ensure that retail stays competitive is harder than in Nashville.

I get that Denver doesn't have the shopping center tax base of some city/counties but I'd think their convention business is a yuge equalizer to that.

Quick check on Nashville and I see that Tennessee's state sales tax is 7% while Colorado's tax is only 2.7%. Nashville's sales tax (before transit vote) is already 9.25% ie a 2.25% city tax. Advantage Denver on this. I don't know if Nashville tourism and convention business is stronger but Denver's sports scene is a plus for Denver.

[wong21fr]

Originally Posted by TakeFive

I get that Denver doesn't have the shopping center tax base of some city/counties but I'd think their convention business is a yuge equalizer to that.

Quick check on Nashville and I see that Tennessee's state sales tax is 7% while Colorado's tax is only 2.7%. Nashville's sales tax (before transit vote) is already 9.25% ie a 2.25% city tax. Advantage Denver on this. I don't know if Nashville tourism and convention business is stronger but Denver's sports scene is a plus for Denver.

Yes, because we're talking about comparing Nashville to Denver instead of Nashville to Frankville or Denver to Lone Tree.

[The Dirt]

Originally Posted by TakeFive

MOAR TOD

Evans Station heating up? Developer requests 8-story rezoning
January 29, 2018 by Andrew Kenney/Denverite

What about zoning?

Evans Station Lofts is one of the best looking affordable apartment projects in Denver. It's about time someone else has looked into building out this neighborhood. I'm sure the NIMBYs will come out in droves, but the best thing this new proposal has going for it is that it's on an industrial block surrounded by industrial blocks. It'll be harder for the NIMBYs to cry about shadows and parking when they're not directly across from it.

[TakeFive]

Originally Posted by wong21fr

Yes, because we're talking about comparing Nashville to Denver instead of Nashville to Frankville or Denver to Lone Tree.

Sheesh... I still don't get your point. If we're comparing Denver to Nashville then anything outside the boundaries of either is extraneous. Unless you're assuming that more people that live outside of Nashville spend money inside of Nashville as compared to Denver. Btw, Nashville metro area's reported population is 1.8 million while Denver metro is 2.8 million so that wouldn't seem likely.

Correction: Colorado sales tax is actually 2.9% (not 2.7).
Nashville city sales tax of 2.25% is much lower than Denver's 4.75%. But it's alway hard to compare city budgets etc for various reasons. Does Nashville get a nice allocation from the state for example?

Originally Posted by Cirrus

Someone with a better handle on Colorado law can answer this better than I can. But I *imagine* the answer will fall into one of these 4 categories:

1. Existing debt cap. These taxes don't pay for the construction directly, they pay to repay bonds that pay for the construction. Denver can only accrue so much debt, and even with additional revenue it may be near what law and/or bond agencies will allow.
   
2. Nothing; Denver could do it if the voters approved it.

I don't think Denver has any statutory limit on debt. Currently Denver is rated AAA by all three rating agencies. So long as dedicated revenue was approved by voters that takes care of TABOR and presumably the rating agencies

Originally Posted by The Dirt

Evans Station Lofts is one of the best looking affordable apartment projects in Denver.

Yup

[TakeFive]

Originally Posted by TakeFive

A simple questionQuestion: What's to prevent Denver from coming up with their own transit plan with a ticket closer to $2.5 billion?

What are we talking about doing specifically?
Let's chat about that.

Pretty easy to figure.

• We absolutely need to build some light rail and the downtown subway. For savings, light rail can be limited to: from the Civic Center down So Broadway to the I-25 Station and also along Speer Blvd to about Colorado Blvd.
• Wong's I-25 and Broadway transit center (ofc)
• Varying amounts of enhanced bus service along Federal Blvd with some amount of centerline dedicated lanes PLUS green streets improvements.
• Varying amounts of enhanced bus serviced along East Hampden Ave to maybe E Dartmouth Ave with dedicated centerline bus lanes between Monaco Pkwy and Tamarac Dr. PLUS green streets improvements
• Better bus service in neighborhoods like Montbello
• To keep the Streetsblog crowd smiling a nice pot for sidewalks and bike lanes.

That's a good start. I figure the subway and light rail to cost ~$1.5 billion in 2018 $'s. As with every city if matching FTA funds can be obtained that's yuge. Good quick look that provides the sizzle, transit improvements for West Denver, SE Denver and NE Denver and I didn't forget the urban-obsessed (I tease). Presumably some money needs to be allocated for operating expenses too.

[bunt_q]

Originally Posted by Cirrus

Someone with a better handle on Colorado law can answer this better than I can. But I *imagine* the answer will fall into one of these 4 categories:

1. Existing debt cap. These taxes don't pay for the construction directly, they pay to repay bonds that pay for the construction. Denver can only accrue so much debt, and even with additional revenue it may be near what law and/or bond agencies will allow.
2. Existing TABOR laws, or other state-level restrictions on revenue.

These are really the same thing. Denver could not issue debt for this at all currently. Would need to go to the voters.

Originally Posted by Cirrus

Someone with a better handle on Colorado law can answer this better than I can. But I *imagine* the answer will fall into one of these 4 categories:

1. Denver somehow having a less healthy/robust tax base than Nashville for one reason or another (could be wong's sales tax thing, although that's not the only scenario I can imagine)
2. Nothing; Denver could do it if the voters approved it.

These are also the same thing. The difference is that while Nashville's plan is city-focused, the tax would still be regional. So we're comparing a pay-in area of roughly 1.8 million in Nashville, to Denver's 600k.

$2.5 billion is just a hard number to get to. That's roughly $150 million per year in debt service.

By comparison, the City's current debt service is (total) ~$90 million. The City's total capital improvement fund is ~$34 million. Total sales and use tax revenues to the City are about $670 million per year. It's just a very big number for Denver. You're not talking an inconsequential tax increase.

If you did it with property taxes, the total general fund contribution from property taxes is $175 million. So by my back of the napkin, you'd need a roughly 8.5 mil increase, or about 11% on a total Denver property tax bill. Probably you blend that with a sales tax increase, but any way you cut it, it's real money.