At Gov. Jared Polis’ State of the State speech last month, he waxed poetic about the benefits of walkable communities served by frequent, convenient transit. Coloradans will save money on gas money and car repairs. Air quality will improve and greenhouse gas reductions will be realized.
As most Coloradans are dependent on their private automobiles and we endure ever-longer traffic jams, this reality appears to be a long way off. If Polis is indeed serious about realizing this vision, his focus should start with the Colorado Department of Transportation, the agency responsible for billions in transportation investments every year.
Historically, Colorado has directed 90% of its transportation funding to highways and driving, ranking our state 44th in its support for mass transit. Clearly this approach is no longer compatible with our governor’s vision. Under a mandate from the state legislature to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, CDOT last year published a plan to shift some spending from highway expansion to multimodal investments. This plan resulted in the cancellation of a planned highway expansion through Denver that it arguably could not afford to begin with. CDOT also announced in November a $170 million investment in bus rapid transit across metro Denver.
While $170 million may appear to be a significant sum to spend on mass transit throughout the region, CDOT regularly spends upward of $150 million on a single highway interchange. If the goal is to transform entire corridors such as Federal and Colorado boulevards into the multimodal, walkable streets that Gov. Polis envisions, CDOT’s funding commitment does not appear up to the task.
CDOT’s aforementioned climate action plan calls for an ambitious goal of nearly doubling walking trips by 2025 from 1,387,839 to 2,446,700 and asserts that rural transit use will recover to pre-pandemic rates “effective immediately.” CDOT hopes to achieve this mode shift not through a massive investment in transit, pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure (many of their urban state highways lack even basic functioning sidewalks) but by relying on policy completely outside of its control- land use and zoning. Eighty-seven percent of CDOT’s projected greenhouse-gas mitigation reductions by 2030 and 96% of its mitigation by 2040 are attributed to increased density from residential and commercial up-zoning over which CDOT has no authority. While land use is an important tool to fight climate change, allowing CDOT to transfer the work of reducing emissions onto cities and towns was surely not the intent of the legislature’s mandate.
With billions in federal stimulus spending on the table, Colorado has the opportunity to truly transform our transportation system for the betterment of our residents and the environment.
To provide just one example: Many Coloradans long for the days when a weekend trip to the mountains did not involve suffering hours of slow-moving traffic on Interstate 70. Gov. Polis has promised that “help is on the way” in the form of a $700 million reconstruction and widening of I-70 at Floyd Hill. No doubt this effort will only shift the I-70 bottleneck further up the hill to the Eisenhower tunnel. Our experience with the I-25 T-Rex expansion and countless others across the country have demonstrated that any traffic relief will be temporary and within 5-to-10 years we will have more cars causing longer traffic jams and spewing more pollution.
Now let us envision investing the same $700 million towards a different end- massively scaling up CDOT’s fledgling Bustang transit system. Subsidized at $1,000 per trip, $700 million could run a bus every 15 minutes, 12 hours a day, for 40 years. For the cost of one highway project we could provide a transit service that diminishes the need to move ever more cars through the mountains and provides a more pleasant, convenient Colorado experience.
In prioritizing transit and other alternatives to driving, I can already hear cries of “government control” and “social engineering,” but this shift would be quite the opposite, allowing for more freedom of movement and choice. Our current transportation regime forces most people to drive everywhere, resulting in endless traffic jams, a brown cloud over Denver and over 700 traffic deaths every year.
Giving Coloradans the option to ride transit that is well-funded and thus convenient, reliable and affordable and to bike on roads that are safe and comfortable will not just lower emissions, these investments would also greatly enhance our neighborhoods and help restore a quality of life that many feel is slipping away.
David Mintzer is a physician and transportation advocate and serves on the leadership council for 350 Metro Denver.
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