The U.S. 36 Mayors and Commissioners Coalition - Westminster, Broomfield, Louisville, Superior, Boulder and Denver - submitted an application to the federal government Monday that proposes construction of one HOT lane in each direction between Interstate 25 and Foothills Parkway in Boulder for a total cost of $234 million.
Carpools and buses ride in them free; otherwise it's pay to ride. If the amount of use the carpool lanes get now are any indication, the request might as well go towards bike paths. They'll be almost as many commuters on each. The US 36 Commuting Solutions Group already is working on the draft EIS of various corridor projects. Which transportation method will you choose to sit in gridlock? Cars, buses, vanpools?
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Using my tax dollars to build HOV/HOT lanes, and then charging me to use them?
Why is there no huge outcry about them charging us twice for these lanes? Because most people won't pay to use them, so they don't care.
But, they should. If these extra lanes were open to all, traffic would move much more smoothly in all lanes. I resent my tax dollars being used for social engineering.
The gas tax is headed south. I'm pretty sure that's undisputed. So with fuel efficiency rising, more people are using roads, with less revenue generated by the traditional source of funding.
One way to look at tolls is as a user fee, to prevent the need for subsidies out of the general budget. It's not like the initial cost to build a road is the only thing that costs money. Funding is needed to maintain roads, and the creative use of tolling can be looked at as a better and more accurate way to exact that maintenance cost over the lifecycle of a road. This is why conservatives and libertarians like tolls.
Even leftist Boulder looked at tolls, as traffic demand management, for years and years. Is that over finally, or just dormant? If you make people pay what driving actually costs, take out the hidden subsidies, it's inevitable that at least a few, maybe many, will look at alternative modes.
Perhaps HOT lanes are a bit of social engineering - though I think applying that term is a bit of a stretch, since HOT lanes generally do nothing more than accommodate the commuting rat race behavior that already exists - but so what? We could just as easily call auto-dominated lifestyles and right-to-drive attitudes a result of social engineering that happened 50 years ago. Can we expect the norm to remain the same always?
For those who don't like pork barrel politics and gambling with deferred maintenance to determine the safety and sufficiency of our roads - and I'm one of them - toll lanes look like a legitimate option. It may be time for BoCo communities to be done with having our cake and eating it too.
Tolls are very smart. 36 will have the free lanes - all the time. E-470 is TOLL ALL THE TIME. So, you can ride for free in low volume times and still move quickly. Or, if you need to haul it in the AM with heavy traffic, you PAY for the privelege. It makes sense. Rich or poor, if you are too lazy to get up earlier, then pay the $$ to get to work. Simple Dimple Dooo.
What is the underlying purpose to this? It seems contradictory that govt. is promoting fast tracks and HOV lanes to make commuting more efficient and get more people out of their cars. Now they want to build toll roads that provides for those who can afford it the ability to continue propagating the problem? Build it and they will come and oh by the way if they don't then charge them through the nose for it? Makes no sense to me.
The underlying purpose of tolls is to pay for roads and maybe secondarily to place other modes of transportation on a more even footing. However, no one has previously made the connection between promoting FasTracks and toll roads, so it certainly fails to make sense if you try to bundle the two together as one idea. They're not.
"Charging through the nose" certainly seems to be one possible outcome of privatizing the Northwest Parkway, incidentally, so it will be interesting to see how consumer and proletariat-conscious the Lafayette council is in approaching that decision.
There was intense controversy - even in our own car, as we used to carpool our way into the I-25 express lanes - when CDOT looked at its HOT lane plan for I-25 and the lower Turnpike. Will opening HOV to HOT spoil the incentive for alternative modes and create an undeserving elite? Today, the reality is that the capacity is far greater than the demand, so the resource is well used to generate revenue. We no longer carpool to the same jobs, but every once in a while, when I'm in a hurry to get downtown Denver, I'm happy to pay the toll and give CDOT some surplus revenue. It is smart. And the people who don't want to pay, and stay in the regular lanes, do not have any reason to have a problem with cars that are paying to get out of their way.
And it does come back to funding. How do you proposed to promote fuel efficiency and fund roads, with the gas tax falling farther behind on ability to pay for free roads?
That is precisely my point. You have government promoting two separate and contradictory ideas. The free market will promote fuel efficiency in vehicles (I heard rumours of gas over $4/gallon in the near future). At the local level we will be trying to address street maintenance by bonding against sales tax revenues (without raising taxes). There are larger planning issues at work here that seem to be cyclical. New Urbanism (live, work and play in the same area) comes and goes. However until urban sprawl hits the wall (hey, that rhymes!) its implementation will be spotty.
Which is precisely my point - I don't see the connection between these ideas.
Whether you have "New Urbanism" (if that still means anything) or some other form of development everywhere, it still costs money to build roads.
Traffic demand on a major intercity road like the Turnpike isn't going to change much with changes in urban form, and if you actually look at the projections on FasTracks, the only way to make transit much more appealing than it already is (only a projected 2% increase in RTD ridership along the 36 corridor even with FasTracks) would be to make better, faster infrastructure. If HOT lanes help to make that a reality and don't affect the performance of the restricted lanes, what's the downside?
I guess that depends on what you perceive the problem to be. It seems that despite govt.'s best efforts to promote rapid transit folks prefer to drive their own vehicles alone. So what is the key motivation to change that? Reduce the need to commute? (the live/work/play in the same area) Jack the price of gas up sufficiently that most folks have little choice?
Government's record of changing individual's through legislation has never been very successful. Throwing extra lanes at the problem is not going to solve it.
Okay, right... So we should insist the extra lanes be free? I don't get the logic at all, Frank.
User fees are not a legislative solution, they are an economic solution. Maybe only a tiny bit of the solution to automobile subsidies, but a small one nonetheless.
And that's on the secondary benefit of tolls. The primary benefit is to reduce dependance on general tax collections.
ever waited at a toll booth?
Go to the Chicago suburbs and try it.
Having lived in Chicago's suburbs, I think E-470 can be just as bad. There may be less traffic, but there is typically only one lane open for cash tolls, and the car in front of you is always looking for directions on how to get to Alberta and cook a turkey, which the bored toll collector is happy to supply.
That's why anyone who uses the toll road regularly buys a transponder. Even the Illinois Tollway - which I have indeed supplied with plenty of coinage in my lifetime - has gotten with the program and makes their transponders available far and wide. My parents bought one in Madison, Wisconsin.
Those toll roads of the Roman Empire had some crime problems. Is there some reason to ignore improvements in the last 2,000 years? 20 years?
Ever wait in traffic on I-25? It's way worse than setting for a few minutes on E-470. The transponder is the way to go though. How about the Golden Gate Bridge? $5.00 to get into San Fran... nothing to leave. Says a lot about the place. Good public transit and few people driving to the city every day. Those that do struggle with traffic.
I see the problem with Front Range commuting as a problem with the population being so spread out. In larger cities where everyone is confined to a smaller area, it is easier to arrange public transportation and most people are within walking distance of a stop.
Exactly.
The other problem with transit is that the center city is no longer the singular destination that it used to be. Given the circumstances, RTD runs a remarkably efficient system.
For those of us who are compelled to commute and leave Boulder County with some regularity, toll roads and transit are options. Options translate into a transportation system that operates more smoothly than one stuck on a mode that has diminishing prospects for sustaining itself.
In discussions with Ron Stewart, the County's Open Space guru, he told me the open space strategy was to cluster cities and towns with major open space buffers between them. Also if you get the lastest statistics on commuting, you'll find that as many Boulderites commute in versus out.
Adding lanes to U.S. 36 has created the major bottleneck on I-25 from N. 104th to where U.S. 36 connects to I-25. So I wonder how getting more folks to that mess faster is going to work?
Highways are more about encouraging development than anything else. The NW Parkway was more about Interlocken and getting folks to Flatiron Crossing and back. Lafayette folks figured out that one could go west on Dillon or 95th and east on Hwy 7 without paying the tolls. Of course the Parkway's response was to raise the tolls on the main drag (the decrease from 75 cents to 50 cents may still be there to go from 287 west, but with the Louisville 95th St. improvements, why bother?).
The analysis of T-Rex was it would save the average commutor 3 minutes. And to me, rush hours in Denver seem the same.
Kerry- I guess that was my point. The towns around Boulder are clustered with tighter population centers, but the towns themselves are spread out. What you get is 1 or 2 buses running from each town to a larger town. It's dificult to get those routes to hit a majority of a community, and if they do it's not certain that the route will go near your destination.
Most people going to Boulder from Lafayette have 2 bus options and you can get to South or north Boulder easily, by choosing a route. If you have a bike it's easy, if you are walking, you may have a few mile walk to the bus stop or a few mile walk or a transfer in Boulder to get to your destination.
I think I have strayed far enough from the original post. I see mass transit as a difficult sell to a lot of people around here because of the issues stated above. RTD does a great job, as far as I'm concerned. anything to get busses or car-pools or the insane toll payer through faster is OK with me. You can't get more people through without paying for more lanes and the state isn't going to pay for it themselves.
Several years ago I met with an RTD Director who was trying to get my development to buy the entire neighborhood RTDs with their new program. There was grant money to assist for the program.
I said to him wouldn't it be great if we have fewer houses and less congestion.
Oh no, he said, the more houses, the more tax money we get.
After the development approved the program (over 180 homeowners turned up for the vote), we applied for the grant money. Turns out he had lied about that and we cancelled the program.
Hmmm......
Ahhhh, Kerry, just tell me that Ron Stewart was the County transportation expert you referred to oh so many moons ago on this board...
Of course not, but I think this is typical of the way not to solve the transportation problem, by pointing to land use problems as the culprit. Yes, they are related issues, but the bottom line is that there is already congestion, and more people are on the way, whether we like it or not.
Boulder has very recently acted, once again to stop a third lane on the Turnpike from dumping traffic into their City, because there is a standing policy not to add any new lane capcity anywhere within Boulder City limits. I believe the theory is that if you constrain choice enough, this will force people to evaluate the viability of other ways of getting around.
I think one can reasonably advocate for no new capacity if one is into the sort of radical policy that is espoused in Boulder. But you definitely have to be pro-transit, or pro-something as a transportation option, if you do take that position. Unless you advocate for the collapse of our economy as we know it, however, simply allowing the transportation system to crumble because you don't like the people or the cost involved is not an option.
Long live the automotive biped!
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