The initiative defines a neighborhood as "contains at least a portion of the MH, RE, RL-1&2, RM-1,2&3, RMX-1&2, RH-1-7, or RR-1&2 zoning districts " - it does not state that areas with other zoning designations are not included. If that was the intent, the drafters made a mistake.

This is a great proposal. Many other communities have done road diets on streets with similar traffic volumes, with great results. Protected bike lanes help give more cycling opportunities to a lot of folks who are "interested but concerned about safety. And the experience around the country shows that converting 4 lane roads with volumes around 20,000 vehicles a day into 2 lanes plus a center turn lane and bike lanes tends to work well - leading to lower crash rates, greater biking, and very little congestion impact- since most congestion happens at intersections, and the center turn lanes keep the intersections functioning. The two areas that are a bit tricky are the intersections of Broadway and Iris, and of Arapahoe and Folsom, where there are 2 left turn lanes. The city is being very thoughtful, and i think will preserve these double left turns, which should avoid any significant congestion impact.

I thought her presentation was pretty funny. And she is basically just pointing out the obvious - there is a huge gulf between the interests of people who already have their piece of the pie in Boulder and those who rent (generally younger and poorer), and that the latter group's interest tend not to be represented because they tend not to participate and vote in low turnout odd year elections. So they should give a "#$ and participate. Not exactly radical. Seems like folks who don't want those folks to participate are calling for her head.

Hi, moabite.

1) This misunderstands the nature of the BRT service. The buses will not stop at Table Mesa - some of them will continue along the 28th/30th corridor to Boulder Junction. Some will continue along Broadway to downtown. So they directly serve most of the major destinations in Boulder - the NOAA/NIST campus, CU, the thousands of employees downtown; the thousands who live along Broadway and along 28th plus all the folks who work and live around Boulder Junction. And at the Denver end - have you been to Denver is the last few years? the level of employment and residential activity in downtown Denver is huge. And there are stops serving Louisiville/Superior, Broomfield, and Westminster. The projected volume on the managed lane grows to 50,000 trips per day, of which over 20,000 are bus and HOV. And if the US 287 BRT gets built, feeding in to 36, that will add another 7,500 bus trips per day.

2) I'm not sure what difference my personal travel choices make to the issue, but in response - I use a bicycle to get around within Boulder. When I travel to Denver, which i usually do for work purposes a couple of times a week, I always use the bus, often with a bike on bus to help get to meetings that are further from Union Station. My experience is that the bus is great - fast and pleasant and , unlike driving, I can get work done while I travel.

The empirical evidence of road expansion not curing congestion is pretty strong. Take a look at this meta-analysis: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/a.... And it certainly seems to have applied to the I-25 expansion through Denver.

That said, i do agree that driverless vehicles, dynamic ridesharing, carsharing, the use of vehicles as a service that you but by the hour or mile rather than something you own, could all drastically impact many aspects of transportation. But it is hard to see how any of these changes would lead you to build bigger roads today. Driverless vehicles are likely to be able to travel in platoons, and to reduce accident rates, eliminating incident based congestion, and allow narrower lanes - all of which suggest you could accommodate traffic without expanding the roads. And if people are paying for trips, rather than buying an expensive vehicle and then having large fixed costs and small variable costs associated with driving, they are likely to drive less.

I think this editorial really misses the mark.

1) Many people do believe the whole road will be tolled. I talked to someone last week who was complaining that his wife would have to quite her job next year because she could not afford to pay the $28 per day that she would now have to pay to use US 36. There is a good reason people believe this - they were told this by opponents last year. I received one of the robocalls from Compass Colorado, the conservative political group, before the CDOT town meetings. It claimed that any trip on 36 would now be tolled- and tens of thousands of these calls went out. Others made the same claims from the left. Many people are still confused.

2) It really missed the mark on the thinking behind the HOT lane. I know, since I was there.The reason we did not approve additional general purpose lanes has nothing to do with social engineering, and everything to do with what economists call "the iron law of traffic congestion" - expanding highways in areas of high demand leads to more traffic on those highways, and within a decade the roads are as congested as they were before. Take a look at T-Rex - after well over $1 billion on highway expansion, that road is now suffering from peak period congestion about as bad as it was before the project. Spending the money on free lanes brings no longterm benefit. It would, however, create a lot of problems- like where all those additional cars would go when they hit Boulder. Modeling suggested you would make congestion much worse on multiple roads in Boulder by adding free lanes to 36. So you get no longterm relief on the highway and worse traffic within town. That's a hell of a way to spend a few hundred million dollars.

3) When RTD went to the ballot in 2004 with FasTracks, it contained two improvements for this area - NW Rail and partial funding ($208 million) for US 36 BRT. It was a core part of the ballot issue, and was the reason a lot of us were willing to support the ballot issue.

4)It is just wrong to claim that the new lane will be just for an upper economic class. That is a legit criticism, which I have leveled, of lots of other roads like E-470 and the Northwest Parkway, and the upcoming express lanes on C-470, which have no HOV and no transit. I can show you demographic analysis of who is expected to use US 36 express lanes, based on the mix of carpoolers, bus riders, and toll paying single occupant drivers , and it does a decent job of matching metro area demographics. The folks who carpool and use buses are a bit more skewed towards low and moderate income; the people who pay tolls skew wealthier, and the total is pretty balanced. This analysis can be found at http://swenergy.org/data/sites/1/media/documents/.... Ironically, if we had stuck with the initial plan that this would be just a bus and HOV lane, I think much of the criticism would evaporate- but adding the tolls means that we use all the capacity in those lanes, and the richer toll paying drivers help pay for the infrastructure that serves the low-moderate income carpoolers and bus riders. That is a good thing, not a bad thing.

For a good discussion of these issues, take a look at http://flatironbike.com/2014/02/14/us-36-for-whom...

Actually, our ozone pollution issue is a regional issue; ozone is transported across the air shed. So for ozone, if denser development leads to less overall driving, it also will tend to help a little bit with regional ozone levels. Most sources of ozone precursors (NOx and VOcs) have been going down, including vehicle emissions. The reduction in vehicle emissions is affected both by the 10% reduction in per capita miles driven over the last decade, and by federal standards requiring lower emissions vehicles. With the new EPA tier 3 vehicle and fuel standards these emissions will drop more. Power plant NOx is going down due to closing coal plants, more renewables, and due to energy efficiency stopping most growth in electricity demand.The big outlier is oil and gas drilling - VOCs from oil and gas have been increasing; any strategy focused on cleaning up ozone pollution needs to have a big focus on reducing VOC emissions from oil/gas drilling and production. the new regs adopted by the state will help, but more remains to be done.

You can find county budget summaries back to 1996 online at http://www.bouldercounty.org/gov/budget/pages/cou... and add up the transportation budget for each year.

Here are the numbers every 5 years
1996 9,840,842
2000 10,135, 192
2005 16, 019,405
2010 20,184,408
2015 58,660, 035

The 2015 number is obviously an outlier, due to spending large amounts on rebuilding roads damaged by the floods. But the patter is clear - that the county has been significantly increasing funding allocated to transportation, not reducing it.

I'm sorry if my previous comment was snarky. i get that there are very different opinions on how to allocate the costs of subdivision road reconstruction, but we should at least be using the same facts.

But as you well know, property tax is a very small percentage of the county transportation budget, which is also funded by sales taxes, specific ownership tax, vehicle registration fees and a share of state gas tax - and the total has gone up substantially over the last 20 years. So pulling out this chart to imply that the county has been cutting transportation funding is pretty disingenuous.

The FasTracks ballot issue included both NW Rail and BRT along US 36 from Denver to Table Mesa: http://www.rtd-fastracks.com/media/uploads/main/F.... The Northwest Area Mobility Study you refer to came a decade later, and also recommends building additional BRT corridors such as along SH 119 and SH 287.

So no doubt that folks voted for commuter rail - but they also voted for BRT. And the truth is the BRT is much better than the train - much faster, come much more frequently, and will be able to pick people up at many more locations.