In his State of the Union address last month, Gov. Jared Polis waxed poetic about the benefits of walkable communities served by frequent and convenient transportation. Coloradans can save money on gas and car repairs. Air quality will improve and greenhouse gas emissions will be reduced.
With most Coloradans relying on personal vehicles and us enduring longer traffic jams than ever before, this reality seems a long way off. If Polis is truly serious about making this vision a reality, he should focus on the Colorado Department of Transportation, which invests billions of dollars in transportation every year.
Historically, Colorado directs 90% of its transportation funding to highways and motor vehicle operations, ranking the state 44th in support for mass transit. Clearly, this approach is no longer compatible with the governor’s vision. In response to a mandate from the state Legislature to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, CDOT last year announced plans to shift some spending from highway expansion to intermodal investments. The plan would cancel plans to widen the highway through Denver, which probably didn’t have room to begin with. CDOT also announced in November that it would invest $170 million in rapid bus transit throughout metro Denver.
While spending $170 million on mass transit across the region may seem like a lot of money, CDOT regularly spends more than $150 million on a single freeway interchange . If the goal is to transform entire corridors such as Federal Boulevard and Colorado Boulevard into the mixed-use walkable streets envisioned by Governor Polis, CDOT funding is not up to the task.
CDOT’s aforementioned climate action plan has an ambitious goal of nearly doubling the number of walking trips by 2025, from 1,387,839 to 2,446,700, and calls for “immediately” a pre-pandemic increase in local transit use. They claim that it will recover to that level. Rather than making huge investments in transportation, pedestrian, and bicycle infrastructure (many urban state highways lack even basic functional sidewalks), CDOT has completely defunded its managed land use and zoning. It hopes to achieve this mode shift by relying on policies that are out of line with the norm. Eighty-seven percent of CDOT’s projected greenhouse gas reductions by 2030 and 96 percent of the reductions by 2040 will result from increased density through residential and commercial upzoning, for which CDOT has no authority. It is believed that there is. Land use is an important tool for combating climate change, but allowing CDOT to transfer emissions reduction efforts to cities and towns is certainly not the intent of Congress’s mandate.
With billions of dollars in federal stimulus on the table, Colorado has an opportunity to truly transform its transportation system for the betterment of its residents and the environment.
To name just a few examples, many Coloradans long for the days when weekend trips to the mountains didn’t involve spending hours in slow-moving Interstate 70 traffic. Governor Polis promised that “help is on the way” in the following ways: $700 million reconstruction and widening of Interstate 70 in Floyd Hill. There is no doubt that this effort will only move the I-70 bottleneck further up the hill into the Eisenhower Tunnel. Our experience with the Tyrannosaurus widening of Interstate 25 and countless other roadways across the country is that any traffic relief is only temporary, and within 5 to 10 years more cars will be backed up. This shows that it causes more pollution.
Now imagine investing that same $700 million for another purpose: a massive scale-up of CDOT’s fledgling bus-tan transit system. With a $1,000 per trip subsidy, $700 million could keep buses running every 15 minutes, 12 hours a day, for 40 years. For the cost of one highway project, we can provide transportation services that reduce the need for more cars to travel through the mountains and provide a more comfortable and convenient Colorado experience.
While we are already hearing cries of “government control” and “social engineering” by prioritizing transit and other car alternatives, this change is quite the opposite, allowing more freedom of movement and choice. Become. Our current transportation system forces most people to drive everywhere, resulting in endless traffic jams, brown clouds over Denver, and more than 700 traffic jams each year. Accidental deaths occur.
Giving Coloradans the option to take advantage of well-funded, convenient, reliable, and affordable transportation and ride their bikes on safe, comfortable roads can only reduce emissions. But these investments also significantly improve our neighborhoods and help restore quality of life. What many feel is going away.
David Mintzer is a physician and transportation advocate who serves on the government’s leadership council. 350 Metro Denver.
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