The view through the American windshield at rush hour isn’t necessarily a pleasant one.
“Commuting in America III,” an exhaustive study released last month by the Transportation Research Board, found plenty of aggravating developments since a previous study was issued in 1996. Among the findings:
America has 134 million commuters. The number of solo commuters is up by almost 13 million.
Commute times are rising. The number of workers who take an hour or more to get to work grew almost 50 percent from 1990 to 2000.
Suburb-to-suburb commuting is growing faster than commuting between suburbs and city centers.
American households added some 30 million vehicles from 1990 to 2000, and 13 million were added to households that already had two or more vehicles.
The percentage of people who walk to work has declined.
There’s an increasing percentage of older drivers in the ranks of commuters, raising future concerns about safety.
All that may make you want to take the train. Starting this week, more of us in the metro area will be able to do just that.
This Friday, RTD’s $880 million Southeast Light Rail Line opens, the fourth leg of system that had its modest beginnings in 1994. It’s a forerunner of the $4.7 billion FasTracks system that will be built out over the next decade and stretch its steel tentacles to Denver International Airport, Boulder/Longmont, Golden, Highlands Ranch and other key points.
The Southeast Line is also a key component of the T-REX project, whose $800 million worth of highway improvements were finished in August.
Along with its accompanying network of bus connections, the 19-mile Southeast Line will provide rapid-transit service to one of the metro area’s most vibrant employment and residential corridors, running along Interstate 25 from downtown through the Denver Tech Center to the northern reaches of Douglas County at Lincoln Ave. A spur runs along Interstate 225 from I-25 to Parker Road. The ride from Lincoln Avenue to the heart of downtown will cost $3.75 and is scheduled to take about 40 minutes.
Transit planners hope the T-REX line will surpass the success of the popular 8.7-mile Southwest Line that opened in 2000. That line and the shorter downtown and Platte Valley sections carry about 35,000 riders a day. It’s estimated there will be 34,000 passenger trips a day on the new line by the end of the year.
Metro-area commuters, of course, shouldn’t expect that T-REX now and FasTracks later will be the easy solution to Denver’s commuting woes. Progress will come as commuters make changes in personal habits, learn new connector bus routes and find parking at RTD station lots.
And patterns of modern-day commuting are increasingly complex, as the “Commuting in America III” study underlines. Suburb-to-suburb commuters won’t be served by a system whose hub is downtown.
Even so, light rail can’t be dismissed as merely a partial solution to a bigger problem, as some critics have complained. It offers choice and convenience to commuters who until now have had little. And you need only glance at the residential and commercial projects sprouting near Southeast Line stations to realize that rapid transit is going to have a powerful impact on development patterns in the decades to come.
Our region is in for quite a ride. Let’s take a moment out of our commute to salute the officials who brought T-REX in on time and on budget.
