If the history of light rail in the southwest corridor is any guide, when T-REX opens in the southeast corridor of Interstate 25 in November commuters are likely to have big smiles on their faces. Fast, clean and efficient, light rail will whisk thousands to and from work each day.
In addition, in January, a lucky 4,000 of those commuters will be smiling even more broadly, for they will be part of a plan to reduce their commuting costs as much as 75 percent or more.
Twenty years ago, 18 metropolitan districts and office parks along both sides of I-25 helped fund improvements in the corridor. More recently, when plans for T-REX were announced, members of the coalition saw that no funds had been budgeted for pedestrian overpasses at three important locations: Orchard Road, Dry Creek Road and Lincoln Avenue. “We needed to move people from the light rail stations on the west side of I-25 to the employment centers on the east side of the freeway,” says Nancy Sharpe, mayor of Greenwood Village.
As there was no funding in the T-REX plan for the overpasses, members of the coalition formed a new metropolitan taxing district and passed a property tax increase of up to two mills on commercial properties along both sides of the corridor. Approval of the mill levy increase allowed the new metro district to issue bonds worth $7.5 million, the majority of the amount needed to build the three pedestrian overpasses.
When that funding was approved, Greenwood Village and Arapahoe and Douglas counties approached the Denver Regional Council of Governments and successfully requested an additional $1.8 million – the rest of the funding needed to make the pedestrian overpasses a reality.
In addition, the new metro district and the businesses, office parks, counties and cities along the I-25 corridor from Denver to Douglas County formed a new Southeast Corridor Transportation Steering Committee. The committee has developed a plan that will provide a “significant subsidy” for up to 4,000 commuters whose employers agree to participate, according to the committee’s executive director, Jim Ryan.
Steering committee representatives will be contacting businesses within the corridor, encouraging them to become part of the Transit Ridership Incentive Program. Businesses that join must agree to institute payroll deduction for employees wishing to pay a portion of their own transit costs. The steering committee will pay another portion of that cost, up to $250 per year per employee.
“We estimate that the average transit cost for an employee will be reduced by 40 to 70 percent, depending on the length of their commute,” Ryan says. He adds that because employees’ transit expenses will be deducted from their paychecks, their shares will not be taxed; this pre-tax option is expected to make up about 25 percent of the savings to employees.
So, come January, commuters on the southeast light rail line will able to cross to the east side of the corridor at three more locations than were originally planned.
Ryan says the association is working with RTD to establish a call-and-ride system to deliver riders to businesses within the corridor. “People will be able to arrange an ongoing pickup time or a single-trip pickup directly with the bus driver,” Ryan says, adding that the steering committee wants to see adequate call-and-ride bus or van transit in place before the opening of light rail.
The model of business and government cooperation in a multimodal corridor has attracted the attention of transit planners from across the U.S. Ryan says, “People come to town and ask, ‘How did you get T-REX? How did you get the jurisdictions aligned?’ We tell them that the jurisdictions themselves first developed a culture of working together. Then they began working with RTD and the Colorado Department of Transportation for improvements.”
Cooperation and working together for mutual advantage: It’s a lesson that should be embraced by all Colorado leaders.
