News that the federal government may help build a high- occupancy vehicle lane in the congested U.S. 36 corridor has renewed interest in advanced bus rapid transit systems that boast a unique guidance system far more flexible than anything available on light rail lines.
The guidance system is known as a Digitally Reactive Interface Vectored Response, or DRIVER for short. While train systems are limited to traveling along their fixed steel rails, DRIVER-equipped buses are vastly more versatile. Faced with a change in plans or an unexpected obstacle, a DRIVER can just wrap her fingers around the steering wheel and turn left on Elm Street.
Light rail and its heavier brethren, commuter rail, have received the bulk of the attention directed to the FasTracks rapid transit plan. But choo-choo trains have severe limitations. They are great at moving large numbers of people swiftly from point A to point B. The problem is that both points are train stations and that’s not where the people want to end up. Thus, a commute by train is really three trips: home to station, station to station, and finally station to destination.
This system works well if you get off in downtown Denver or the Denver Tech Center, where there are shuttle buses to get you to your final stop. But train travel won’t work as well to get me from The Denver Post to the University of Colorado’s Boulder campus – where I lecture periodically in pursuit of my destiny of reducing the sum total of human knowledge.
The commuter rail line now planned to link Denver to Westminster, Boulder and Longmont by 2015 will stop at 30th and Pearl in Boulder – forcing most passengers to catch a shuttle bus to campus.
That’s much less convenient than the express bus I can now catch at RTD’s Market Street station. It travels down U.S. 36 until the advanced DRIVER system turns off to swing through Table Mesa and drop me off at the CU campus. The only problem with taking a bus to Boulder is that it can get caught in the traffic snarls that now befoul U.S. 36. That’s why RTD planned a bus rapid transit route with an exclusive HOV lane for buses. Given the same exclusive right of way a train enjoys, an express bus can get you to your destination much faster than a train by marrying the speed of rapid transit to the flexibility of buses circulating through neighborhoods at either or both ends of a route.
The problem with the U.S. 36 proposal in the original FasTracks plan is that RTD had called for two HOV lanes in each direction, separated from the existing four-lane turnpike. That’s very expensive, and RTD’s financing plan consisted of the wan hope that the cash-strapped Colorado Department of Transportation would scrape up an extra billion dollars to build it.
Then, the U.S. 36 Mayors and Commissioners Coalition, which represents the local governments along the route – Westminster, Broomfield, Louisville, Superior, Boulder and Denver – stepped forward with one of those practical ideas that local officials so often generate to solve local problems. Why not just build a single express lane alongside each of the two existing free lanes? That can be done for a relatively modest $234 million.
Recognizing a good idea when she saw it, U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary Peters came to Denver this week to announce the corridor is a finalist in her department’s Urban Partnership program, which is designed to reduce traffic jams.
Since buses and car pools alone aren’t likely to fill the express lane to capacity, unaccompanied drivers will be allowed to use the lanes by paying a toll, as they can already down on the HOT (high occupancy or toll) lanes running from downtown Denver to where U.S. 36 begins. Those tolls will help pay for and maintain the project and will also speed up travel on the existing free lanes by drawing off part of their existing traffic.
So cheer up, Denver/Boulder travelers. There may be a DRIVER in your future.
Bob Ewegen (bewegen@
denverpost.com) is deputy editorial page editor of The Denver Post.
