“Once most people took to the Tramway to shop downtown,” a report in the Denver Post read. In one of its last annual reports, it blamed plummeting ridership on the region’s embrace of suburbs and car culture in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1967, the Denver Tramway Corp., which ran a fleet of 231 buses in the region, went bankrupt. And I learned that it all starts with Americans’ love of automobiles. I dove into hundreds of newspaper articles. I interviewed past members of its board of directors and government officials. I talked to some of the people who developed RTD’s original plans.
Denver traffic patterns driver#
When I first heard of the agency’s early-and audacious-vision for the region, I was settling into a new job at Streetsblog Denver, a now-closed advocacy journalism nonprofit that covered the city’s efforts to improve walking, biking, and public transportation. My job was to become an expert on the region’s current transportation problems, including the worsening crisis at RTD.Īs I learned more about the agency’s current woes-declining ridership, driver shortages, funding gaps, and more-I wondered: How did it all go wrong? A freelancer now, I started to travel back in time. The Denver Post called the plan, “one of the boldest-if not the boldest-public works plans in Colorado history.” There was even mention of a subway on what is now the 16th Street Mall. By encouraging smart growth and getting people out of cars and onto public transportation, RTD hoped to reduce traffic congestion and erase the recently arrived brown cloud. The plan set out to solve some of the region’s most difficult problems, too. That's only $1 per issue! Subscribe Today » This “Personal Rapid Transit” system is the backbone of A Public Transportation Plan for Colorado’s Regional Transportation District, a seven-volume set of plans developed in 1972 that sought to unite six counties with transit service so fast and frequent that owning a car would become an unnecessary extravagance. Hop in and you would be whisked away over a network of overhead tracks crisscrossing 100 miles around the Denver metro area.
It envisioned a future with elevated transit stations where you could push a button to select your destination and a space-age pod would appear. In the 1970s, the newly formed Regional Transportation District (RTD) had plans to create a transit system that would be a marvel. 5 Big Ideas to Transform Denver's Infrastructure.Celebrate The Best Restaurants at 5280 Dines This October!.The 25 Best Neighborhoods in Denver in 2023.
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