DENVER CO:I-25/SE Variable Pricing Best - 3/3X/3X/3 proposed

Under the previous Dem. Romer Admin no increase at all was proposed in the mainline and the successful Republican Governor Bill Owens ran criticizing rail and suggesting extra lanes. But in office he has been sold the idea that federal support will only be obtained if rail is included.

The new report titled “Let Those Who Receive Benefits Pay the Costs: an Analysis of the Colorado State Govt’s Flawed Plan for I-25" (Independence Inst) by prominent Denver area engineers Stephen R. Mueller and Dennis Polhill concludes that the special interests’ rail-heavy/road-lite plan promises minor benefits at high cost. Their exhaustive study of alternatives concludes that the best option for the corridor is a 4-roadway configuration of 12-lanes in which an existing 2x3 unrestricted lanes is supplemented with another 2x3-HOT lanes - the I-15 San Diego model of high occupancy vehicles free and the remaining capacity managed with variable tolls.

“Under the (state) plan motorists are stuck in gridlocked traffic today, they will be stuck in gridlocked traffic during construction, but what is worse is that they will be doomed to gridlocked traffic on the day this new project opens and forever into the future.... This report clearly shows that in order to achieve congestion free driving on I-25, a pricing mechanism must be implemented... HOT lanes offer a future of congestion free driving, and those who receive this benefit will be the ones who pay the costs of the highway improvements. HOT lanes offer far more choices to people than fixed-guideway mass transit systems, and they are environmentally superior and more tax-payer friendly than either light rail or new free lanes.”

USEPA tackled

The report lambastes the USEPA for unwarranted and misinformed intervention on behalf of the new-trolley/road-lite scheme. Proponents have been saying that voters have to approve bonds for the trolley, or else the USEPA will not approve the limited road improvements envisaged and nothing will be able to be done to alleviate existing congestion.

The Mueller-Polhill report says: “The USEPA has no authority to dictate a specific transp technology. It is simply not true that if the voters turn down light rail, as it has been in the past, that the highway can’t be widened. What is true, however, is that any new plan will have to demonstrate “conformity” with the USEPA approved air quality plans.”

But, they calculate, the HOT lanes alternative by attracting more to carpools and by offering freer flow traffic will garner a 29% larger reduction in air emissions than the new-trolley/road-lite scheme. Moreover transit needs will better be met by operating new buses in the congestion-free HOT lanes than by building a new rail line.

Trolley interests however have manipulated the planning process, the engineers report, to the point that “blatant untruths” were included in early versions of “official” documents and the MIS and DEIS are “hardly more than propaganda pieces” intended to rationalize the view favoring light rail.

The I-25/SE covers 26km (16mi) from Broadway on the immediate south of the CBD to Lincoln Avenue, the first arterial south of the C-470/E-470/I-25 IC. There are 16 interchanges. It is called the Southeast Corridor since most of this section of I-25 is oriented southeast from the CBD. I-25/SE currently runs about 170k veh/day. This is projected to rise to 300k by 2020. With an average trip length of 8km (5mi) about a million trips/day are suggested, or about 1.2m people. Over most of the length of the project there is sufficient space in the right of way – 20m to 25m (65' to 82') for an extra 6-lanes, though in the northern portion, from the CBD south to the IC with I-225, there are a number of places where the spare ROW is only 15m (50'). In these bottleneck areas some property demolition would be required for the 4x3-lane format.

The Mueller-Polhill report says that projected growth in traffic on I-25/SE will approximately fill the proposed unpriced fourth lanes by about 2007 when the project is due to open, so motorists will not see any significant improvement in the present stop-&-go in peak hours. Bus and trolleys currently carry just under 2% of trips in the Denver area. Official estimates are that by 2020 the I-25 trolley will carry 30k passengers/day or about 2.5% of trips, about one year’s growth on the highway. And the 30k trolley usage is based on directing many existing buses to trolley stops, discontinuing direct bus services.

As the authors point out similar projections elsewhere have proved optimistic. The trolley is officially estimated to cost $883m ($13m/track-km) to build and to need average taxpayer subsidies of $23m/year which amortized over 30 years at 4% amounts to about $400m (present value) more. If the ridership projections are met each trolley trip will cost taxpayers nearly $4 [($883m+$400m)/30kx365x30]. If not the costs will be higher. In striking contrast the engineers find a free/HOT lanes alternate to be self-financing. Rail is touted as giving people an “alternative” to congestion, but Mueller-Polhill point out that the free/HOT lanes alternate provides a far better alternative – a faster ride 20mins vs 60mins to far more people than rail – to at least 500k/day vs 30k. And they don’t estimate the economic value of improved package and cargo deliveries, quicker business-trips and service calls from the road alternative versus the trolley which can hardly cater to these kinds of trips at all.

91X model for X-lanes

The engineers use 91-Express operating costs and its relationships of revenue to traffic conditions and model the costs and revenues of various configurations of free lanes/HOT lanes/light rail for I-25/SE. The most profitable of course involves configuring I-25 as a toll road! Minimal free lanage. But they accept that for political reasons it is necessary to keep the 2x3-lanes presently free. They say the experience on 91X shows that a managed HOT lane in which differential tolls are used to meter traffic has a daily capacity a third greater than an unmanaged lane due to its ability to move some traffic to the shoulders of the peaks. So a 6-free and 6-HOT lanes will provide the same capacity as 14-free lanes.

Each of the 3 HOT lanes very likely can move a third more vehicles than an unmanaged lane. Therefore, from a traffic management perspective, constructing 3 HOT lanes would be functionally the same as constructing 4 GP lanes. Mueller and Polhill accept the offiical cost estimates of $11m/lane-km ($18m/lane-mi) which seem high [the comparable UT/I-15 rebuild is costing less than half at $5m/lane-km] so they base their case on a 12-laner costing $1.7b.

A bunch of spreadsheets of different configurations with and without the trolley look at likely toll costs and revenues based on the 91X model and capital construction funded with revenue bonds. The best result for taxpayers, not suprisingly is turning the whole thing into a toll road. 2/3X/3X/2 is also a net giveback to taxpayers, but if you accept that the existing 2x3-lanes free have to be left free then the best is 3/2X/2X/3 which comes quite close to breakeven. Longer term 3/3X/3X/3 is probably needed but a venture capitalist told to leave the 2x3 free lanes would, on the analysis here, opt to open with a central 2x2 HOT lanes.

None of the trolley options make any sense in this analysis for the simple reason that the same capacity as a trolley line can be provided more efficiently by running buses in the X-lanes which of course get paid for by the tolled cars. In addition air emissions with free flowing traffic and no trolleys with the X-lanes additions are significantly less than congested traffic on 2x4-lanes plus trolleys. The report then tries to pull all the measures together and finds the more tolling, and the less trolley, the better the social outcome overall.

BACKGROUND: Polhill was city engineer at the City of Lakewood and president of the state chapter of the Amer Public Works Assoc, and Mueller was Colorado Engineer of the Year in 1993 for his work on pavement, and is a past president of the Colorado Society of Engineers. They say they did the report for nothing, out of outrage over the trolley-biased I-25 studies. The work represents about a year of part-time work for the two of them. They have developed a new methodology for MIS/EIS. (Contact SRMueller1@AOL.COM, Dpolhill@aol.com, Independence Institute 303 279 6536 http://i2i.org/SuptDocs/Transportation/LetReceiversPay.htm)