Certainly, there’s never enough money for roads and mass transit. The old ways of paying for transportation are flawed, and the new ways risk freaking out the Luddites.
But for the sake of conversation, forget about the lack of revenue and the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights for awhile. Because even if lawmakers suddenly found the money, there is still the problem of how best to spend it.
And if you’ve driven on the many parking lots we call roads in Colorado, you know we need ideas. We need innovations. We need practical solutions that can open clogged lanes overnight.
We need out-there, George Jetson notions that may never work, but inspire other solutions that can work. But we also need some realism.
Today, in the first of an occasional series, the editorial page kicks off a public dialogue on transportation — and we welcome you to join in.
Stop with the fairy tales
You live in a city, an area teeming with productive and busy people who relish an urban lifestyle and mobility as much as you do. There will always be traffic — whether we you drive a Prius, a Smart Car or Hummer, and whether we enhance bike lanes or use more buses. No amount of money, centralized planning, brilliant ideas or massive new projects will alter that basic fact.
Denver’s population has been growing. The city is constantly on those “best places to live” lists and a recent national poll by Pew Research Center found that adults picked Denver as the country’s most desirable big city to call home if they had to move.
So expect more traffic, not less.
Start being realistic
No large city can afford a grid that never locks.
“You can’t just pay your way out of this or pave your way out of this,” says Bill Vidal, who manages Denver’s Department of Public Works.
So let’s not even try to provide an infrastructure that could withstand an entire populace going to work and coming home at roughly the same time.
Look around in the middle of the day or later in the evening: Everything flows just fine.
So why not start using the grid more effectively?
Stop wasting money
Forget massive vanity projects that alleviate only a tiny percentage of congestion. Be more nimble and innovative. And don’t always do the obvious.
Take, for instance, crumbling infrastructure. All those reports about “structurally deficient bridges” are a lot of bunk. Don’t buy those doom-and-gloom reports calling for billions in new spending to repair so-called dangerous bridges.
As Jack Shafer wrote recently in Slate, “The state of the nation’s bridges ain’t as dire as the press makes it out.” Shafer notes that the Transportation Department’s own definitions of “structurally deficient” and “functionally obsolete” indicate the bridges can be maintained and kept in service for years to come.
Congestion pricing
Make more use of technology like simple transponders to charge drivers who add to the crush of high-use areas at peak travel times.
Reward those who carpool with free lanes or rebates. Run more buses on those dedicated lanes. Buses can haul as many 60 people but take up the same amount of space as a handful of SUVs. If they truly got from point A to point B more quickly than cars, more people would ride them.
Coupled with rolling work times, such strategies would thin traffic significantly.
Rolling work times
No matter if you support big government or free-market solutions to transportation challenges, the fact is that we would pay fewer taxes if we simply made better use of the current multimodal system.
Employers should phase in workday start and end times. Bosses should take advantage of technology. A significant portion of commuters would evaporate overnight if more employers trusted employees to work at home.
Government should provide tax breaks for companies that embrace these ideas.
Employees sick of fighting rush hours should demand it.
Free hired drivers
Deregulate the hired car. Why should a finite number of permits be issued to cab companies? Free-market advocate Jon Caldara, president of the Independence Institute, wonders why for-profit carpooling is against the law.
It’s a good question. Free up private enterprise and personal freedom to create traffic solutions.
Maybe the promise of a little profit is all a neighbor needs to figure out a carpooling system you’d go for.
Better bike lanes
Despite a lot of bike trails in the Denver metro area, less than 1 percent of commuters ride bicycles. That’s probably because the trail system currently attracts recreational riders. Make them work where we work.
Micro rentals
Denver and other cities are experimenting with shared public bicycles and bikes rentable for brief periods in congested areas.
Some cities are partnering with rental-car agencies to offer much the same service. The idea is that a mass-transit user or carpool rider now has to return to the single-car option to run errands on certain days. Cars available for an hour or so with easy access points greatly solve that problem.
Why not look for other quick and easy options, like mini-lots with scooters or even two-wheeled electric vehicles to rent as well?
An old idea is new again
Denver will soon launch a study of a plan to use streetcars on East Colfax Avenue. The theory is that commuters who aren’t interested in buses but who are tired of fighting that clogged stretch of asphalt might embrace those romantic conveyances from yesteryear.
Denver planner Steve Gordon says the streetcar idea is as much an economic stimulator as traffic-reduction device. That would be a neat trick.
If it works, Gordon says, the city could use the streetcars in other areas.
Democracy now!
The urban planner Andres Duany once said that “Amateurs accustomed to emulation made great places. It is the professionals of recent decades that have ruined our cities and our landscapes with their inventions.”
We need more bottom-up planning and amateurs taking an interest in the streets they use. After all, who understands the ins and outs of the local commute better?
To this end, there are a number of open-sourcing technologies available that have assisted communities like Portland in crafting and tracking traffic flow, bus routes, biking lanes and fundamentally changing the way citizens are involved in infrastructure.
Thomas K. Wright, executive director of the Regional Plan Association, an urban planning group in the New York area, told Wired magazine that 99 percent of “planning in the United States is volunteer citizens on Tuesday nights in a high school gym. Creating a software that can reach into that dynamic would be very profound, and open it up, and shine light on the decision-making.”
And the more people we get involved the better.
David Harsanyi and Chuck Plunkett are members of The Post’s editorial board. Contact them at dharsanyi@denverpost.com or cplunkett@denverpost.com.
