Mass transit may mean more people
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Allen Best
May 16, 2005
"Build it, and they will come." That phrase has
become a mantra since Kevin Costner's character began hearing it incessantly in
his Iowa corn field in the movie 1989 movie "Field of Dreams."
That's clearly what happened with Interstate 70. Before the interstate,
Steamboat Springs and Routt County were more populous and thriving than Vail and
the Eagle Valley. Grand County, also bisected by Highway 40, was more happening
than Summit County.
Interstate 70 has turned the tables, and then some. But what happens if a
monorail or some other kind of mass transit is constructed along the freeway?
Beware what you ask for, because you just may get it, warned Jeff Kullman, one
of the state's regional transportation directors.
"If you build it, they will come. You guys live in the most desirable
places in the world. If you make it possible to live in Summit County and work
in Denver, they will," he said.
He might have also said Eagle County, one of the fastest growing places in the
country. A quarter-century ago, just after the highway arrived, the population
stood at less than 14,000 . Now it's estimated to be 50,000 and projected to hit
117,000 in another 25 years unless a lot more people begin commuting to the
valley on a daily basis. Up to 33,000 commuters are forecast.
While there is wide-spread agreement among mountain residents that highway
widening cannot continue indefinitely, agreement about mass transit is
incomplete.
First, to justify mass transit, higher population densities would be required.
In metro Denver, transit planners figure on upwards of 200 housing units per
acre along the FasTracks corridor, while elsewhere transit planners generally
figure that it takes about eight units per acre to make bus systems work
efficiently.
Most subdivisions run three or four units per acre, while densities in Eagle
County run much, much less Ð an acre or less in many places.
Nothing wrong with Disney
So, do mountain residents really want the population densities that would be
required to underwrite the costs of mass transit - and the populations that
would come if mass transit is created?
Bill Wallace, a Summit County commissioner, thinks being a bedroom community
isn't such a bad idea.
"If we could get more of our second homes to be permanent homes, I think it
would make Summit County a healthier place to live, because people would be
taking part in the community," Wallace said.
"Whether we are a bedroom community or a resort community, we will always
have pressures on us for use of recreational forests. We are the closest
national forest to the Front Range with recreational amenities.
"What I cannot accept is more cars, more pollution, and more places to park
cars," he added.
In Eagle County, Commissioner Peter Runyon also does not see mass transit as a
deal-breaker. He sees mass transit supplanting additional automobile traffic
,though not eliminating it.
"We need to move, not only as a state, but as a country, to alternative
modes of transportation," he says. While a mass transit system along the
I-70 corridor might seem prohibitively expensive, he points out that something
like 11 percent of the nation's airport budget was absorbed for building of
Denver International Airport.
A united I-70 corridor community allied with metropolitan
Denver might dislodge similarly remarkable amount of federal money, he suggests.
It might well help make Eagle County a bedroom community, but the most important
point is that the middle class is on its way out of Eagle County as it is.
Runyon favors a very deliberate strategy to diversify the economy, perhaps by
soliciting financial or medical sector industries.
At the same time, a mass transit can also stimulate the tourism economy, he
says. Responding to dismissal of the proposed monorail by Colorado Gov. Bill
Owens as a "Disney ride," Runyon says that the I-70 corridor is in the
tourism business and so a Disney ride would be appropriate.
Remember the monorail
Leadville Mayor Bud Elliott, who owns the Timberline Motel, favors mass transit
into the mountains. Leadville's summer economy is doing OK, he says, but the
winter economy needs help, and he and other city council members believe Ski
Cooper could get more customers if there was a mass transit link from Denver.
In Avon, town manager Larry Brooks is dubious that Eagle Valley residents really
want to accept the sort of population densities that would be required to
justify the investment needed for a major mass transit.
"It would require land uses that would fly in the face of what most of our
constituents want," he says. What might make more sense, he suggests, is a
light-rail system from Edwards to Vail.
It is often said that people in the Alpine countries have a wonderful train
system that Coloradans should strive to imitate. However, Greg Hall, Vail's
public works director, and Jim Lamont, executive director of the Vail Village
Homeowners Association, who visited the Alps this year, report that trains are
getting increasingly less use.
Arriving in St. Moritz, Vail's sister city in Switzerland,
they found a 600-car parking garage. Throughout the Alps they found a remarkable
system of tunnels, many of them burrowing deep through mountains, built to
accommodate highway traffic.
Bill Jensen, the chief executive officer of Vail Mountain, foresees mass transit
in 25 to 50 years, but not necessarily to Vail. What he also sees is more
tunnels, and perhaps for trucks instead of mass transit.
As the Eagle Valley urbanizes in the next 30 to 40 years, mass transit might
well make sense as the valley becomes more of a bedroom community.
As for mass transit technology, Summit County's Wallace, a former high school
math teacher who has been involved in the monorail advocacy since the late
1990s, believes the technology is imminent. It is largely a matter of having
money for research.
A magnetic-levitation system now being tested in Pittsburgh may have some
answers of the I-70 corridor, he says.
Yes, he acknowledges, some technology goes afoul, the most prominent example
being the baggage-handling system at the Denver airport. On the other hand, we
have put people on the moon and we can talk with other people around the globe
via our satellites while sitting at wireless computers in the middle of many
mountain towns Ð an extraordinary demonstration of technological prowess.
Vail, Colorado