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Originally Posted by s.p.hansen
Denver has some massive advantages because it went the route of many cities and annexed the entire county.
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To clarify, Denver didn't annex the rest of the county, a' la, say, Phoenix. Denver was already a consolidated City & County early in its history. What happened was that (anti-urban) voters constitutionally restricted further annexations by Denver, which locked its boundaries overnight. Very different result - Denver didn't spread to fill its boundaries, like many western cities. Its boundaries were already full. (With the exception of the airport annexation, which gave Denver some limited greenfield development options - but that took three elections to approve, which isn't practical for 99.9% of annexations a City would otherwise undertake.)
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Originally Posted by s.p.hansen
It was able to create a tax that upgraded its sports facilities to top tier status and bump up its arts game.
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These are actually multi-county regional taxes, all approved by metro-wide voters. Still a great thing, but an example of regional cooperation, not anything Denver has done on its own.
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Originally Posted by s.p.hansen
Reading through the Denver threads there seems to be a frustration that actual transit in downtown and urban style or urban potential Denver is being de-prioritized in favor for greater park and ride style suburban transit projects pinwheeling out from the core.
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All true. The endgame for Denver likely involves a second overlapping transit agency that is City-serving.
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Originally Posted by s.p.hansen
So I'm interested in seeing what our metro can do with under a billion in increasing our average person's yearly ridership in say 10 years when compared to 10 more years of FastTracks in Denver. Like you said, I'm pretty sure it's gonna be neck and neck.
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I think Denver's transit ridership will be directly proportional to two things: (1) poverty, like transit always is, and (2) the strength of downtown as an employment center. If Denver can find a way to reign in some of the suburban employment growth, and channel more of that back downtown, transit ridership will grow. If it can't, ridership will quickly plateau, albeit at a much higher level than today. You can only get to 100% mode share for downtown commuters; after that, you have to find someplace else to grow ridership. And Fastracks is not a system structured such that it will transform the day-to-day transportation lives of many people.
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Originally Posted by Hatman
As for secret weapons that make a difference, I see things like the Farepay (pre-paid) card
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God help us, SLC has fare cards. Literally, God, please help us. It'll take divine intervention for RTD to figure out fare cards. Somewhere in some developing country, a transit manager is reading this and laughing at the fact that a major U.S. transit agency still hasn't figured out fare cards. It's a running joke, actually, in this remote third world city - don't do things all "Denver-ey," they say, when describing institutional incompetence.