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How Denver Is Becoming the Most Advanced Transit City in the West

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Re: How Denver Is Becoming the Most Advanced Transit City in the West

#51

Post by narrowrail »

vidarh wrote: post #45
julienchastang wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also longtime Boulder resident here. Yes, agreed 100%. Boulder and surrounding NW communities really got the shit end of the stick here. The phony BRT seems little different than what is in place now (just replace the ABX sign with BRT, and there you go), but something that we will probably have to live with for a generation at least. I don’t have high hopes for how the buses will perform during snow storms (unlike r…

> how the buses will perform during snow storms Depends greatly on how well you treat the roads. I'm from Norway, and we have areas where you'll not be able to see over the snow when driving at certain times of winter, and keeping the buses running is usually not a big problem, as long as the roads gets cleared regularly. > unlike rail which has fewer problems in inclement weather ... also depends on how prepared the…

Denver is only about 5500ft in elevation, is much lower in latitude than Norway, and gets about 300 days of sunshine per year. But, Denver does see 3-5ft snow storms every 5 years or so (i.e. they have the snow removal equipment and know-how). The rail would have been so much better than the bus will be.

Re: How Denver Is Becoming the Most Advanced Transit City in the West

#52

Post by jmccree »

kissickas wrote: post #47
abduhl wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mountain states are car states. Denver is not a city like New York where people go without getting their license until they are in their mid-20s. Having Uber or great public transportation will not change the fact that much of the draw of Colorado is that you can drive two hours and end up in the mountains or on the plains. Colorado self-selects for cars and they will not be going away any time soon.

Let me offer a concurring opinion - Uber seems incredible expensive for two or three trips a week, from my experience. It works best when you're with a group of friends/family members and you are all drinking or don't feel like dealing with driving and parking. I would never consider it as an option like a normal cab for when I just need to do the week's grocery shopping or run out to get something at midnight, when…

Uber now includes Uber X, "rideshare" type service with drivers in their own personal cars. Where I am, a 2 mile cab ride to the grocery store will be $12 without tip, the same on Uber X is ~$6. It's far cheaper and less hassle, and uber x actually shows up unlike cabs. The introduction of uber(x) has let me postpone buying a car for a few more years.

Re: How Denver Is Becoming the Most Advanced Transit City in the West

#53

Post by akgerber »

davidw wrote: post #43
abduhl wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mountain states are car states. Denver is not a city like New York where people go without getting their license until they are in their mid-20s. Having Uber or great public transportation will not change the fact that much of the draw of Colorado is that you can drive two hours and end up in the mountains or on the plains. Colorado self-selects for cars and they will not be going away any time soon.

I agree with your statement, but "you can drive two hours and end up in the mountains or on the plains. " - why would anyone drive two hours to be out on the plains?!

Hunting, maybe?

Re: How Denver Is Becoming the Most Advanced Transit City in the West

#54

Post by akgerber »

abduhl wrote: post #34
jseliger wrote: post #14

Will metro residents give up their cars? I wonder if the rise of Uber will affect this. When I lived in Seattle, I noticed that a lot of people didn't commute to work via car but had one anyway, usually for one or two trips per week. Public transportation (buses and later light rail) were pretty good from about 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. or so during weekdays but were horrible the rest of the time. Bikes could be used intermit…

The mountain states are car states. Denver is not a city like New York where people go without getting their license until they are in their mid-20s. Having Uber or great public transportation will not change the fact that much of the draw of Colorado is that you can drive two hours and end up in the mountains or on the plains. Colorado self-selects for cars and they will not be going away any time soon.

No American city is a city like New York— its public transit system is an order of magnitude different in ridership from any other: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_rapid_tra...

That said, once a car isn't needed for day-to-day life in multiple neighborhoods in a city, and likewise once relaxed parking space requirements make it such that keeping a rarely-used car isn't trivially easy, (and especially an economy where reliable used cars have become far more valuable and unnecessary line-items in the budget might be quickly removed) the economics for young adults tilt pretty heavily toward tossing in gas money to with your car-owning friends or renting a car for $100 every few weekends when desiring a trip to the mountains. And urban families might become one-used-car-kept-for-10+-years families as opposed to one-car-per-adult families.

My understanding is also that Denver has a pretty-decent network of bike trails and a relatively-mild climate, which also means two-to-five mile trips can be pretty easily covered without a car.

Of course Denver won't become New York— but it stands a chance of becoming less of an auto-required city and more like the DC area, which is a relatively young metro area for the East Coast with a mass transit system from the modern era and new urban nodes at outer transit stops, and many people still own cars but plenty don't, especially in the urban core.

Re: How Denver Is Becoming the Most Advanced Transit City in the West

#55

Post by akgerber »

saosebastiao wrote: post #33
Osiris wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SLC light rail is significantly cheaper than RTD. The furthest zones in Denver are $10 round trip. When I was in SLC it was $2.50 round trip for anywhere on the entire line (I'm sure it's more by now). Personally I believe that public transportation pricing should be based on an algorithm to maximize ridership rather than on being self-sustaining. Since the point of public transit is to reduce traffic, people that pr…

Scaling costs for cars is linear (no congestion) to polynomial (congestion), whereas transit has scaling costs that are a step function on the level of an individual vehicle, and somewhat resembling a logarithmic scale in aggregate. That in itself isn't interesting until you understand the implications of subsidy policies. For example, if you subsidize auto travel, you may pull people away from walking, cycling, or t…

One of the major subsidies for auto drivers is deeply hidden in land use policies requiring huge amounts of free parking at all new construction, rather than the amount the developer desires at the price that the market will bear.

Auto-oriented land-use regulations (single-family-only neighborhood zoning, minimum parking regulations that can only be cheaply satisfied by surface lots, minimum setbacks, minimum lot sizes, building-height limitations, etc) also cause buildings to be built so far apart, with seas of parking in between and a road network that's inhospitable to walking due to poor pedestrian connectivity and the danger of high-speed traffic, that it isn't possible for pedestrianism to offer meaningful competition to automobiles in much new construction in the US. And since most transit trips begin & end with a walking trip, transit (publicly- or privately-provided) likewise becomes uncompetitive. And this is essentially all due to government policy, often at the local level but also sometimes essentially federally mandated due to FHA mortgage requirements and the like.

Re: How Denver Is Becoming the Most Advanced Transit City in the West

#56

Post by akgerber »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #21
saosebastiao wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, SLC is the ultimate counterpoint to the whole "Republicans are destroying transit!!" hysteria. SLC's core is definitely left-leaning, but just a few miles outside the city center it is pure Republican territory. And despite the heavily skewed demographics, they are voting in massive numbers to extend rail transit to their cities. It is quite amazing what will happen to voting trends on transit investment when…

Do you have any idea why this is the case? Some aspect of Mormonism?

There's a huge racial aspect in anti-mass-transit politics in many American cities that's missing in SLC. Transit is fundamentally urban, and in a lot of the country 'urban' is code for black.

Re: How Denver Is Becoming the Most Advanced Transit City in the West

#57

Post by blackaspen »

kposehn wrote: post #19
bri3d wrote: post #3

The Northwest suburbs (Boulder, Louisville, Lafayette, Broomfield, Longmont) got quite screwed over in this deal - we approved and paid into the 0.4% sales tax in 2004, but ended up with only years of disruptive highway construction leading to a privatized tollway and fake Bus Rapid Transit. We didn't even get real BRT as the buses run in the private toll lanes rather than their own grade and the buses board and debo…

The Northwest line is already under construction to Arvada, correct? I believe they are working westward right now. As for the line up to Boulder, blame the expense of building a completely separate right-of-way along the BNSF Brush Subdivision, a very busy funnel for coal trains :-/

There is a separate line to Arvada, I believe it's the Gold line. That's still on track.

Re: How Denver Is Becoming the Most Advanced Transit City in the West

#58

Post by akgerber »

ghaff wrote: post #41
bignaj wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but you don't have to deal with it every single day. Metro offers pretty horrendous bus service especially considering their cost per passenger one of the highest in the country. Recently voters thwacked a measure seeking more funding for Metro and one of the main reasons I think (among others like aversion to car tab expenses) was anger at mismanagement.

My experience is that everybody (where everybody is defined as a significant majority but not everyone) tends to be at least fairly negative about public transportation that they're forced to use day in and day out. I could name a number of cities that I consider to have pretty good transit if you're going from the right point A to the right point B where I could still imagine it being pretty tiresome using it all th…

NYC has by-far the best transit in the US, and people still constantly complain about it. I don't think there's any method of commuting people actually like, other than maybe bikes.

Re: How Denver Is Becoming the Most Advanced Transit City in the West

#59

Post by akgerber »

roycehaynes wrote: post #49
roycehaynes wrote: post #48

Downtown Denver resident here. I have to attest that the light-rail has been a tremendous win for Denver and surrounding area residents. Along with the bus system, Uber, and Car2Go, I started using light rail last December and never looked back. Even though there are hopeful plans to expand commuter rail to Boulder, I still think the FastTrack Program is a good decision. Boulder's been a stiffed by the new developmen…

I have to counter some of the comments regarding buses and light rail being empty. This is completely untrue. People are using the light rail and buses in large sums. It has its off peaks but certainly before and after working hours is extremely busy. Most people who say their empty are likely the same folks not using public transportation. I had the same consensus before trying out RTD.

Transit riders see mostly see full busses & trains because they're riding the heavy-ridership routes through dense neighborhoods. People driving in spread-out neighborhoods mostly see empty busses & trains because they see the busses mandated to serve sprawling neighborhoods to serve people who can't drive or to provide service to all of the transit system's tax base, even if those neighborhoods aren't built in such a way anyone would ride transit by choice.

Here's a paper & a couple excellent blog articles on the topic: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0966692308... http://usa.streetsblog.org/2013/08/14/jarrett-walker-empty-b... http://www.humantransit.org/2009/12/yet-another-transit-isnt...

From the paper's abstract: "Public transport faces an increasingly intense conflict between patronage goals and coverage goals. Broadly speaking, patronage goals seek to maximize patronage of all types, while coverage goals lead to the provision of service despite low patronage – to achieve social inclusion objectives for example."

Re: How Denver Is Becoming the Most Advanced Transit City in the West

#60

Post by cylinder »

jseliger wrote: post #14

Will metro residents give up their cars? I wonder if the rise of Uber will affect this. When I lived in Seattle, I noticed that a lot of people didn't commute to work via car but had one anyway, usually for one or two trips per week. Public transportation (buses and later light rail) were pretty good from about 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. or so during weekdays but were horrible the rest of the time. Bikes could be used intermit…

Nobody is going to use Uber to make trips to Home Depot, the grocery store, weekend getaway to the mountains, etc. That's what that one car per household is for.
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