Downtown Area Plan (DAP) Public Review Draft

The City Council-adopted Northeast Downtown Neighborhoods Plan (2011) already calls for redesigning Welton Street to get the rails away from the narrow sidewalk and to convert to two-way operations, based on overwhelming community consensus on the topic and prior studies and plans leading up to that adopted neighborhood plan. This draft plan continues and refines that idea.

So I reject the suggestion that there's no problem to be solved in the design of the street and the location of the rail, as you seem to be making.

And experience shows that the extended single-track section on Welton is incapable of functioning reliably at 15 minute frequencies when it's part of the D Line due to actual (and understandable) variability in when trains arrive in the downtown loop from the south. Missing a light or additional time for an operator to help someone with the ramp occurring a couple times on the way from the far south to downtown and Welton was regularly enough to miss the window for the single-track section with 15-minute schedules, causing the trains to just sit a the switch in front of the library for ~5 minutes every few runs, waiting for the southbound train to pass. Handwaving that transit signal priority on Welton itself would be a panacea and 10 minute frequencies are possible with the current track layout flies in the face of experience and evidence.

The end of your comment, James, uses "transit" repeatedly, as if transit=rail and rail=transit. That slight of hand is not appreciated. The things you're saying about transit are true -- and not exclusive to rail-based transit.

Actually, I think Welton can be redesigned as a two-way transit-rich street with multiple services using it as a trunk for the area for less money than the inflation-adjusted cost RTD estimates to extend rail on Downing (without fixing Welton at all).

It's about the placemaking and the transit, not about what kind of wheels the transit uses.

The City Council-adopted Northeast Downtown Neighborhoods Plan (2011) already calls for redesigning Welton Street to get the rails away from the narrow sidewalk and to convert to two-way operations, based on overwhelming community consensus on the topic and prior studies and plans leading up to that adopted neighborhood plan. This draft plan continues and refines that idea.

Whether the two-way Welton with transit has new rails (a la streetcar) or is multiple rubber-tire services, we can't ignore or reverse the community consensus on redesigning the street, widening sidewalks, adding amenities like a real tree canopy, etc. Transit-rich, whether or not that transit runs on rails. (And it would be far more reliable if it didn't -- see for instance RTD's last several years of demand destruction with repeated rail outages)

The City Council-adopted Northeast Downtown Neighborhoods Plan (2011) already calls for redesigning Welton Street to get the rails away from the narrow sidewalk and to convert to two-way operations, based on overwhelming community consensus on the topic and prior studies and plans leading up to that adopted neighborhood plan. This draft plan continues and refines that idea.

Everyone wants the one-seat ride vision from FasTracks -- from downtown through Welton through Downing to 38th/Blake. It's actually far from clear whether it still makes sense to envision that as a rail-based service, or to make it a rubber-tire based service. But the service itself should exist, in conjunction with a redesigned Welton Street that the community has consistently been calling for for a very, very long time.

Keanan,

The City Council-adopted Northeast Downtown Neighborhoods Plan (2011) already calls for redesigning Welton Street to get the rails away from the narrow sidewalk and to convert to two-way operations, based on overwhelming community consensus on the topic and prior studies and plans leading up to that adopted neighborhood plan. This draft plan continues and refines that idea.

Showing up over a decade late and saying the design is fine, and denying the felt and experienced dangers of the current arrangement is not persuasive.

Yes! At minimum, the section in front of Union Station should be closed to more seamlessly connect the station to the adjacent businesses and restaurants. That street is only ever full of clueless uber drivers who get in the way, anyway.

Welton is in a great place to be made a 'primary pedestrian corridor' but the connections across Park and Broadway to downtown need to be made much less hostile as part of that effort - it could become a pleasant walk from the end of 16th street up to Downing, but the it needs investment to make that happen.

*R&D

Yes! Let's encourage people to get between neighborhoods, not just within downtown, with active modes of transportation - downtown, and this plan, can and should position itself as the hub to make those connections start happening!

Fully agree!
Only point I'll make is - these are not accidents; they're crashes, maiming, and murders. Looking at one's phone or being drunk while driving is not an "accident", it's a deliberate action taken by a selfish, uneducated, and generally unsafe person that heavily effects other people, and we need to start talking about it that way, and treating it that way.

I mostly agree with you, but I struggle to see why cars deserve to have unfettered access to every street but bikes should not get the same treatment? Surely some of our streets with 3 lanes in one direction (like 17th Ave) could stand to lose a lane and have better bike access. Cyclists are customers of businesses on these streets, too. It's also no big deal for a car to go a few blocks over to get to a car lane...

Please publish these as an interactive GIS-based map outside of this document too!

We spend a lot of money on transportation in general as a society, but a lot of that money has gone towards giving private vehicles the upper hand, even though in many cases they are less space-efficient and create other problems. Investment in transit is only one step in the process, and cars will still be more competitive in many use cases. However, for an area like downtown where space is at a premium and traffic noise and air pollution degrade the experience for large numbers of people, investment in transit - done well - should be able to outperform investment in car convenience when looked at in the context of the overall social cost/benefit and not just the direct (heavily subsidized) benefit of driving a car.

As I see it, part of the issue in that area in particular is the relatively hostile-to-people environment that is created by the area between Park and Broadway, both roads with lots of lanes and generally higher speeds. These form barriers that many people don't see as worth the effort to walk across, leaving the area between getting much less foot traffic and making it a place where anti-social behavior can thrive. Finding ways to better connect downtown and Five Points / RiNo across Park & Broadway could bring more foot traffic, which would allow more business to thrive here, which would make it a less inviting place for people who are just looking for somewhere to cause trouble.

RTD is pretty competitively priced, and has not shown evidence of reduced fares significantly increasing usage. Instead, streamlining how fares are paid (with tap-to-pay) so that no one needs to think about having a certain app, or a pre-loaded card, etc. would likely make a bigger difference, along with building a more equitable fare structure that allows people who need it to better access discounted/free fares. But ultimately, the biggest predictor of usage is service - frequency, span (length of time the bus/train runs throughout the day), and convenience. That can and should be made better through and to/from downtown so that transit becomes a competitive and attractive way to get to this area.

Roads that go from somewhere else TO downtown generally don't seem to be the problem - it is more the roads that go THROUGH downtown - these take up valuable space and prioritize movement of cars rather than movement/experience of people. Yes, there are needs to get vehicles close to specific destinations/business such as delivery trucks, but other cities have found great ways to manage this and still create great pedestrian-friendly spaces that don't prioritize movement of vehicles within downtown. I would argue that not being able to park directly in front of -for example - the restaurant someone is going to is not a barrier, it is a minor inconvenience that is more than made up for by a more walkable environment around that restaurant.