I went to one of the inaugural Boulder County Transportation Master Planning meetings… on January 13th. I took notes, but never wrote them up (bad blogger!). The process will probably take most of the year, and it’s looking out 25 years or so into the future, so really 6 weeks isn’t too big a deal, right? If you haven’t already, please do take the Boulder County TMP survey.
Before the meeting there was a mingling session with a bunch of poster board presentations (available here as PDFs), mostly maps showing a bunch of different current and projected data. Where people are, where jobs are, where trips go, both today and our imagining of 2035. I talked briefly to George Gerstle (whose bicycle parking spot is pictured above) about the current and projected population centers in the region.
Boulder County 2010: Blue=Households, Red=Jobs
The expectation is that there will be a lot of sprawling, suburban, car dependent development just beyond the southeast corner of Boulder County around Broomfield, in Jeffco, and also in the southwest corner of Weld County (which does not participate in RTD). Also, growth is projected along the I-25 corridor, and along US 36. By and large, what happens beyond the county’s borders is out of our control. There’s a little bit of open space out there that we own, and we can control what kind of infrastructure exists within the county, but barring sudden and sustained increases in gas prices, it seems unlikely that these communities are going to embrace transit oriented development and compact urban design. We’ve got sprawl at the gates, and we have to decide what to do about it. These bodies politic are apparently not interested in planning around the possibility of significantly higher fuel costs in the future.
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