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Are You a Rail~volutionary?

Posted by  on May 11, 2012

Like riding public transit? Enjoy walkable urbanism? Join the New Rail~volutionaries for their first monthly happy hour. Come and learn what we are all about and meet other Rail~volutionaries in the Denver Region!

Denver New Rail~volutionaries (DNRV) is an informal organization of transit supporters that focuses on celebrating and educating the Denver region about transit’s role in creating a livable community. Their goals and interests overlap a great deal with local professional organizations such as Transit Alliance, ULI, APA, CNU and many other related organizations, but Denver New Rail~volutionaries is not driven by membership fees and is open to all who are interested in meeting and attending events with others who are passionate creating a more livable region through transit.

While all of the other organizations will be valuable partners and opportunities will exist to co-sponsor events and collaborate in other ways, the Denver New Rail~volutionaries will exist as an informal forum for conversation about transit’s role in evolving walkable urbanism throughout the Denver region. Attendance at events will expose participants to knowledge about the history of transit and emerging transit investments in the Denver Region, advantages and opportunities that transit offers and an understanding of its relationship to a livable community.

The Denver Chapter is part of the New Rail~volutionaries, a national networking group associated with the annual Rail~volution conference and passionate about the impact of new professionals in creating livable communities. This group aims to connect a wide spectrum of new and emerging transportation and land-use oriented professionals and advocates at the conference and throughout the year. These individuals share a vision to create places that are more equitable, sustainable and economically vibrant.

The Denver New Rail~volutionaries first event is an introductory happy hour at Lucky Pie, located at 16th and Wazee, on Thursday, May 17th starting at 5:30 p.m. Be sure to like us on Facebook and look for more events in the near future!

For more information about Rail~volution: http://www.railvolution.org/

Facebook Happy Hour Event:  http://www.facebook.com/events/315688138503135/

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Filed under Transit.
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Denver Union Station Construction

Posted by  on April 11, 2012

I’m late posting these pictures, but it’s better late than never. Thanks to the folks at RTD and the DUS Project, I was lucky enough to be invited on a site tour of the $500 million Denver Union Station redevelopment project a few weeks back. We saw the construction of the second half of the bus box close to the historic station, the work going on inside the portion of the bus box already built, as well as the plaza space close to the new light rail station.

The day of the tour was coincidentally the day of one of the major concrete pours for the floor of the new bus box. There were going to be a total of eight pours required to complete the floor – that’s a lot of concrete. Notice the intricacies in the rebar required for the bus box.

 

 

I think one of the biggest improvements (besides simply access and capacity) over the future DUS Bus Station over Market Street are the new skylights being installed to allow natural light to flow in. Market Street Station usually seems like a cave, even on very sunny days. It also feels dank and compact with the absence of anything resembling natural light. The future DUS Station will have very large skylights (I believe a total of seven) to bring in natural light.

 

As most of us know, the portion of the bus box that has been constructed is a little more than half of the future DUS Bus Station. It spans from just west of the Wewatta Street alignment out towards the Consolidated Mainline tracks and the new light rail station. The bus box seems surprisingly spacious, however, once the interior walls are constructed, I’m sure it’ll not feel so large. Not compact or tight by any means, but probably not as roomy.

 

Crews are currently working on interior utilities (water, power, exhaust, etc.) and to say it looks complicated is an understatement.

 

One of the more visible components of this project that sparked some of the most intense discussion are the three air intake/exhaust outlets on the western end of the bus box. They’ve been temporarily wrapped in blue plastic to protect their white exterior during construction, but will be unwrapped when construction’s complete. One of the outlets is for air intake, one for exhaust, and one is going to be used only in emergency situations (bus fire, station fire, etc). You’ll notice they’re not perfectly vertical either – this was done on purpose. The designers used analysis looking at how air flows through the site to ensure that the air exhaust doesn’t feed right into the air intake. That’d obviously not be a good thing. The outlets have a bit of a sculptural quality to them, which we’ll see once they’re unwrapped. On the plus side, their blue wraps makes for a cool blue hue in the bus box below.

 

The plaza up above the bus box and directly adjacent to the new light rail station is starting to take shape as well. The pavers are being laid and the area will be landscaped soon to take advantage of the time without passengers to help them get established. Notice the large planters – the edges of these planters are the perfect height for people to sit on.

 

 

As you can imagine, the area is buzzing with activity. There are workers all over doing everything from pouring concrete at the bus box floor to building flagtone-lined planter beds in the plaza area.

 

This project has come a long way in a short time, but we’ve still got two more years of construction before its all done. The second half of the bus box will be buried, Wewatta Street reconstructed, interiors of the bus box will be completed, the 17th Street Promenade area will be constructed, and the commuter rail station (among many other smaller projects) will be completed all within the next two years. When combined with the transformation of the historic station into a hotel and other private development projects in the CPV, the DUS area will be a mecca of construction over the next few years.

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Filed under General Urbanism, Infrastructure, Transit, Transit-Oriented Development.
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Genius: Bus map color coded with frequencies

Posted by  on March 28, 2012
click to enlarge

The map at right shows bus routes in Salt Lake City, with each route color coded to show the frequency of buses. What a genius idea.

One of the many reasons rail systems are usually more popular with casual riders than bus systems is that rail systems are much easier to understand. With only five routes, RTD’s light rail map is a breeze to figure out. On the other hand, the bus map is so complex that it’s barely comprehensible even to experts.

Part of the problem is that any large bus agency (RTD included) will necessarily have a lot of routes that don’t come very often, and generally aren’t used by very many people. Those routes clutter up their maps, making the overall bus system harder to understand for anyone hoping to know where they can use transit to travel quickly and easily.

One solution to this problem is to produce a separate map that only shows frequent service routes. Such maps are incredibly useful, but their weakness is that users simply looking for a system map may not be aware that a separate frequent service one exists. It’s asking a lot for people to know what kind of bus map they should ask for.

So why not put the info on the regular map? Do what Salt Lake City’s transit agency has done here, and show the frequent routes in a different color.

Sure, it adds a little bit of extra clutter, but it also adds a tremendous amount of extremely useful data. The clutter cost is low in terms of information provided.

To its credit, RTD’s bus map does show some premium services with different colors. Limited stop buses get a purple dashed line, express buses get red, etc. But a bus that comes every 10 minutes is shown with the same line as a bus that comes once per hour.

I like limited stop routes, but knowing there’s a limited stop overlay on Colfax is far less important than knowing that buses there come so often that riders can just walk up to a stop and never have to wait very long for a bus. RTD’s map isn’t showing the more important piece of information.

Incidentally, Salt Lake City has a very impressive transit system for a city of its size. It’s the 50th largest metropolitan area in the US, with a regional population equivalent to Birmingham, AL and Rochester, NY. It is less than half the size of metropolitan Denver. And yet it has a 35-mile light rail system, a 44-mile commuter rail line, bus priority routes, and a modern streetcar under construction. It is probably the most impressive small city network in the country.

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Filed under Transit.
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Eve of Demolition: Denver’s 15th Street Bridge

Posted by  on March 24, 2012

Tonight is the last night for Denver’s 15th Street bridge over I-25, as we know it. Starting overnight, its demolition will begin, assuming CDOT sticks to its schedule.

There are only three bridges over I-25  in central Denver that are original to the highway’s construction in the 50s/60s: the 15th Street bridge, the W. 23rd Avenue bridge, and the Speer Boulevard bridge. All three are showing their age, substantially. CDOT assures us they are all still safe, and I don’t doubt that they are at the moment, but their replacement in the short-term is inevitable. The replacement of these 50+-year-old bridges represent the type of infrastructure investments we need to be making in Denver and throughout Colorado and the country.

The original 15th Street bridge was designed during an era when only motor vehicles mattered. Pedestrians were barely an afterthought and, in the case of the 15th Street bridge, they were offered only a narrow 5-foot-wide sidewalk; an unpleasant and uneven passage in a harsh environment for sure. The new 15th Street bridge will be somewhat better. The sidewalks on both sides will be 10-feet wide, with attractive iron fencing (same as what’s on 20th and 23rd) separating the pedestrian from the busy highway below. On the bridge’s non-pedestrian surface, there will be four lanes striped for motor vehicles, two in each direction, with the right-hand lane in both directions marked with sharrows to support a slightly more bicycle-friendly environment. I’ll have more to say about the bicycle issues on 15th in a future post.

The rebuilding of the 15th Street bridge is part of a bigger project to increase southbound I-25′s efficiency. The new 15th Street bridge will have a much wider span across the highway, thereby allowing CDOT to remove a pinch-point in the traffic flow of southbound I-25 between 20th Street and Speer Boulevard by adding auxiliary lanes that will eliminate the conflict between exiting and merging traffic.

Meanwhile, Denver was planning a major project called the Central Street Promenade, which would add a 10-foot-wide concrete ped/bike path along the highway-side of Central Street between 16th and 20th. Fortunately, CDOT and Denver agreed to merge/expand their projects, and so now we’re getting it all: a rebuilt 15th Street bridge, a wider/more efficient Interstate 25, and a new Central Street Promenade from 15th to 20th. For more details, check out my original post on this project here.

How about a few photos of the 15th Street bridge for posterity’s sake?

This “I-25 expansion/15th street bridge reconstruction/Central Street Promenade” project should  be finished by late 2013/early 2014.

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Filed under Infrastructure, Multi-Modal Transport.
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