Rod Frankin

Regional Transportation District (RTD) is putting smaller cars on the light rail tracks. New versions of Denver’s existing light rail cars and multi-unit electric trains are on the menu of transportation enhancements for central district neighborhoods and the eastern corridor of the expanding FasTracks mass transit system.

With planning for the eastern leg of the 12-year project moving into its fourth year, RTD is looking to “streetcars” and electric trains as the two transit options after hours of discussion on safety, pollution noise, and the potential for property demolition between North Downing Street and the more industrialized regions south of I-70 that approach Aurora along the Union Pacific Railroad.

A draft Environmental Impact Statement, (EIS) overseen by RTD, Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) and Federal Transit Administration will be the guiding milestone this year. Residents from Five Points, Elyria Swansea, Globeville, Whittier, Cole, Clayton, Northeast Park Hill and other adjoining neighborhoods will be able to chime in with their preferences.

The EIS draft also covers planning for new rail linkage between downtown Denver and the airport-bound FasTracks route. Currently, central corridor transit (the D Line) stops at 30th and Downing streets. Engineers have targeted a new route which they say would carry riders from the Civic Center as far as the corner of 40th Avenue and 40th  Street, where they could pick up the FasTracks train and travel all they way to DIA.

Construction on the eastbound FasTracks route is not expected to be complete until 2015.

“Public involvement is a significant part of our EIS process going on in each of these corridors,” said Pauletta Tonilas, an RTD public information manager. “It is one of the elements that help us shape our decision-making.”

Since door-to-door outreach was initiated in 2003, public input and planning has moved forward methodically on corridor-wide, block-wide and neighborhood-wide levels. Forty two block and neighborhood meetings were held during the second half of 2003, and since then 16 corridor-wide meetings have been scheduled in eight two-day sessions to weed out unpopular rail routing alternatives.

Jumetta Posey, who heads a public information coordination group called Neighborhood Solutions, said more traditional forms of outreach were reserved for places like Montbello, Stapleton, Green Valley Ranch, Aurora and Commerce City, where mass transit decisions are expected to have a less direct effect than in other areas. In higher-impact neighborhoods such as Five Points, Globeville, Cole, Elyria Swansea and Clayton, 29 block-wide meetings have helped RTD get a handle on citizen consensus. In addition, eight different working groups are assigned to monitor different elements of the project. Most of their energy so far has been devoted to three categories: community impact, interchange locations, and rail station locations.

At various stages of the process, property owners made it clear they would not tolerate certain intrusions. For example, Posey said, some residents viewed the idea of running transit along Martin Luther King Boulevard as the equivalent of “defacing” the street.

Neighborhood Solutions supports alignment of the eastern FasTracks corridor along Smith Road south of the Interstate, a preference which has RTD’s support, according to East Corridor Project Manager Mike Turner.

A fair amount of negotiation has also taken place between RTD, CDOT and Union Pacific Railroad officials, who have urged the need to observe Federal Railroad Administration crash compliance rules that require heavier construction of mass transit cars running in proximity to standard freight line cars. At this writing, 135-passenger “electric multiple unit” trains are preferred over the diesel-powered transit trains and a purer form of light rail that RTD previously considered, Turner said.

In the central district, additional changes in the mode of rail car planned have been prompted by issues related to expense and system flexibility. Sixty five-foot “streetcars,” rather than the existing 80-foot light rail cars now operating, would be deployed, with resulting cost savings being used to fund the extension of transit lines southward to Civic Center.

These aren’t the quaint streetcars of San Francisco fame. Rather, they have design features which are very similar to the existing transit cars. “We’re speaking of a modern streetcar. In this case it would be very similar to the vehicles operating in Portland Orgeon,” said to Derek Crider, deputy project manager for the eastern corridor.

Using the smaller cars would eliminate the need to demolish buildings along the central district route, and service would be more frequent, with spans as brief as 12 minutes between pickups as opposed to the current 15 minutes. Streetcars observe normal traffic laws and are required to stop at lights. Seven stops would connect Civic Center and 40th Avenue, Crider said, with three 120-passenger streetcars accommodating an estimated daily ridership of 3,000.

As the mass transit planning timeline enters its home stretch, compromise is likely to be a continuing factor in the formulation of decisions. Fortunately for planners, traffic and bus use patterns already are fairly well understood in Five Points and other vintage Denver neighborhoods. So too is the maximum distance a resident is willing to walk to get to a transit station.

“Regional models take into account a lot of different kinds of data, based on where people are coming from and where they are going to,” Turner said. “The outside extreme in terms of walking distance is a mile to a mile and a half, but more typically we look at who would walk a quarter mile to a half mile.”