The Antiplanner’s faithful ally, Wendell Cox, likes to say that “transit is about downtown.” This is because most transit lines represent spokes focusing on a downtown hub, making it easy for people throughout an urban area to take transit downtown, but difficult for them to get from anywhere outside of downtown to somewhere else that is outside of downtown.
This can be seen in the above map of Denver’s 2004 rail transit plan known as FasTracks. All of the rail lines but one converge on downtown Denver, where about 20 percent of the 120,000 workers take transit to work. Even though downtown has less than 10 percent of the region’s jobs, 40 percent of all transit commuters in the region commute to downtown jobs. (All of these numbers are from Cox’s 2014 Central Business District report, which is based on 2006 data.)
There’s one line on the map, however, that doesn’t go downtown. It’s identified as the I-225 line, and it connects the East corridor line with the Southeast corridor line. The area where it meets the Southeast line is known as the Denver Technological Center, which has close to 100,000 jobs. Only about 2 percent of workers at the tech center took transit to work in 2006 because, even though it was served by a light-rail line, it wasn’t at the hub of several lines and thus was hard for most people to reach by transit.
The I-225 line opened in February, 2017 as the R Line (R for AuRoRa, at the north end of the line, because A was already taken for the East Corridor line). Light-rail trains go from Aurora to the Tech Center and continue to the south end of the Southeast Corridor to Ridgegate (another reason to call it the R Line).
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The main purpose of this line seems to be to help Tech Center workers take transit to the airport. In a classic example of poor planning, however, the R Line and airport A Line use different technologies and so trains can’t run through from the Tech Center to the airport. This means air travelers from the Tech Center have to change trains at Aurora, which always reduces ridership.
When the line was planned, planners predicted it would attract more than 15,000 riders a day by 2025. When it opened in 2017, officials for Denver’s Regional Transit District predicted it would carry 12,000 riders a day in its first year. Actual ridership was less than half of that, so as long ago as last September RTD started talking about reducing weekend and off-peak service. After some debate, RTD maintained off-peak weekday service but reduced weekend frequencies from four times an hour to two.
Lately, RTD has been running just one light-rail car at a time on the R Line. Though some Denver lines use four cars, officials admit that R Line ridership is so low that the line doesn’t even need two cars.
Pretty much all of the FasTracks lines have attracted fewer riders than predicted, but few have done so poorly that the transit agency has made major cuts in service. This is just more evidence that transit is about downtown and lines that don’t go downtown are an even bigger waste of money than ones that do.
Fastraks is classic subsidy for the city, for the downtown. Something like 40-50% of Denver’s office space is in the Tech Center. Is that more than just a neighborhood in size?
Sure? But there is a core to it. And surely experts on transit could come up with something “innovative” to serve it. A new LRT line? Not really as I225 skirts the edge of the old development but doesn’t increase accessibility of the core area. Maybe a E-W rail line to tap into the existing SW line? Nope. How about BRT on Arapahoe where transit isn’t running along a freeway? Nope.
Bike sharing? No. Bikeways or bicycle boulevards? Hell no. Maybe a busway or three with circulator buses? No, no, no.
So what the hell was Fastracks about? 2 things:
a) Transit agencies primary customers are the politicians. 80+% of their revenues come the politicians. They want to keep them happy. And political power tends to lie with the established powers, especially the Denvers of the world.
Note that Fastraks had token improvements for areas that politically weren’t likely to favor it. Golden gets a rail line but not Parker. The Tech Center gets a token line touching on it’s old part primarily to serve Denver’s airport. Boulder gets what are essentially 3 lines labeled as 2.
Transit is primarily about serving the politicians.
b) Rail
B plays into A. The rail is about serving the polticians. But it was also about building rail, NOT building ridership. That’s why there’s no BRT on Arapahoe linking the SW line with the Tech Center. That’s why there’s no BRT serving the fastest growing areas like Brighton or No. Doug county.
Hell, express buses on the shoulders of I225 would’ve provided better service than light rail. And the money? THey’ve created an enormous mess squeezing DOUBLE TRACK over, under, along I225 and building all those flyovers and unders and stations that serve so welll…… an extended stay suits a handful of single family homes.
There wasn’t a problem in Denver that they couldn’t solve with rail. At least that’s how they behaved.
IT WAS SHEER, UNADULTERATED LUNACY!!!
And that doesn’t include the how-the-hell-was-that-not-criminal dark accounting they used to create Utopian sales tax projections, 3rd world construction costs ( and as we’re seen with the A-line, 3rd World signaling and PTC ), etc, etc, etc.
This was prime fodder for some author like Sinclair Lewis who would’ve delighted in pointing out it’s absurdities.
Of course the beauty of it was that Fastbacks is that, like these other transit proposals, they’re not really about doing anything other than showing the world that we’re really good people. We’ve got world class tra….. oh, wha? what? They’re empty?
And like the North Koreans giving some foreign dignitary a tour, RTD and others steers the world to what they want to be seen. Look at those full trains going downtown! Never mind that, as I experienced first hand, that’s empty going back out. They don’t show that; like some dark authoritarian regime they only trumpet what they can sell as a success.
RTD may be a public agency in name but in terms of behavior, they’re a giant succubus.
BTW, did RTD and it’s crony business partners ever get PTC to work on the airport line? Or did they go ahead an apply for exception?
A Denver TV station had a piece on local train noise in Arvada, including an interview of a resident of newly-built stack&pack condos near the train line and his threat to move. The City of Arvada is on top of the situation:
Summing up: “It’s the federal government’s fault, so just shut up.”