Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine
The car-choked city overcame regional distrust to build a major transit system that is remaking the urban core and the suburbs, too.
A decade ago, travelers arriving at Denver’s sprawling new airport would look out over a vast expanse of flat, prairie dog-infested grassland and wonder if their plane had somehow fallen short of its destination. The $4.9 billion airport—at 53 square miles, larger than Manhattan—was derided as being “halfway to Kansas,” and given the emptiness of the 23-mile drive to the city, it felt that way.
Last month, arriving visitors boarded the first trains headed for downtown, a journey that zips past a new Japanese-style “smart city” emerging from the prairie before depositing passengers 37 minutes later in a bustling urban hive of restaurants, shops and residential towers that only six years ago was a gravelly no man’s land—an entire $2 billion downtown neighborhood that’s mushroomed up around the hub of Denver’s rapidly expanding light rail system.
The 22.8-mile spur from the airport to downtown is the latest addition to a regional rail system that has transformed Denver and its suburbs. Using an unprecedented public-private partnership that combines private funding, local tax dollars and federal grants, Denver has done something no other major metro area has accomplished in the past decade, though a number of cities have tried. At a moment when aging mass transit systems in several major cities are capturing headlines for mismanagement, chronic delays and even deaths, Denver is unveiling a shiny new and widely praised network: 68 stations along 10 different spurs, covering 98 miles, with another 15 miles still to come. Even before the new lines opened, 77,000 people were riding light rail each day, making it the eighth-largest system in the country even though Denver is not in the top 20 cities for population. The effects on the region’s quality of life have been measurable and also surprising, even to the project’s most committed advocates. Originally intended to unclog congested highways and defeat a stubborn brown smog that was as unhealthy as it was ugly, the new rail system has proven that its greatest value is the remarkable changes in land use its stations have prompted, from revitalizing moribund neighborhoods, like the area around Union Station, to creating new communities where once there was only sprawl or buffalo grass.
“We are talking about a culture-transforming moment,” says Denver mayor Michael Hancock. “Light rail has really moved Denver into the 21st century.”
“Our adolescence is over, and we’ve matured to adulthood,” he adds.
How the $7.6 billion FasTracks project saved Denver from a dreaded fate locals call “Houstonization” is the story of regional cooperation that required the buy-in of businesspeople, elected officials, civil servants and environmentalists across a region the size of Delaware. Their ability to work collectively—and the public’s willingness to approve major taxpayer investments—has created a transit system that is already altering Denver’s perception of itself, turning an auto-centric city into a higher-density, tightly-integrated urban center that aims to outcompete the bigger, older coastal cities on the global stage.
“I think Denver could disrupt Silicon Valley as the hotbed of innovative technologies,” says Stuart Wall, the New York-based CEO of Signpost, an automated, small-business platform provider, which opened a 30-person office in a former stable near a downtown light rail station two years ago. “San Francisco has an oversupply of tech firms and is enormously expensive. If I were to do it all over again, I would consider having our headquarters here and our satellite office in New York.”
In recent years, Denver has been storming national rankings lists: Brookings Institution demographer William Frey’s best (2011) and second best (2013) city for attracting millennials; the best city for college graduates (2014, Apartments.com); the largest increase in residents with college degrees (U.S. Census, 2014); the best commercial real estate market (Coldwell Banker, 2015); the second best for launching a startup (2014, Forbes); and, this year, U.S. News and World Report’s best place to live.
“We’ve become a top destination for millennials, and FasTracks is a significant part of that,” says Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, who championed the expansion of rail transit as Denver’s mayor in the mid ‘aughts.
And it all happened, Hickenlooper and others note, because Coloradans across the base of the Front Range were willing to set aside crippling rivalries and make some big collective investments in themselves.
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The interior West’s reputation as a bastion of libertarian individualism has always been overblown. Going it alone was impractical in a region so remote from markets, so bereft of navigable rivers or farmable land, so populated with Native American peoples strong enough to resist usurpers that it stopped yeoman farmers and herdsmen in their tracks. Settlement here was largely dependent on railroads, ore smelters, mining equipment, dams, large-scale irrigation projects and fortified military posts. And those things didn’t happen without capital from distant corporations—the Central Pacific, the Hearsts, Anaconda Copper, for example—or on the federal government, which owned and still owns much of the land.
“The West is a semi-arid area and sometimes you can have harsh conditions even down here below the mountains,” says Governor Hickenlooper, who is fond of noting that barn raisings were more common than shootouts. “What really allowed the West to be settled was the wagon train, where everyone is organized, working together, and has their own chores and tasks. That’s how individuals survived.”
“People,” he notes, “have a broader self-interest than they often think they do.”
Denver exhibited this ethos from the outset. In 1866, eight years after the gold mining base camp was founded on the banks of the South Platte River, residents received the crushing news that the Transcontinental Railroad would bypass them in favor of Cheyenne, 100 miles to the north in Wyoming, where the mountains were easier to traverse. In response, Denver’s 4,800 residents raised nearly $1 million to construct a spur to Cheyenne, a three-year project that cemented the town’s status as the metropolis of the mountain west.
“We’re still the most isolated major metro in the country, the only one for 600 miles in any direction,” notes Ken Schroeppel, an urban planning professor at the University of Colorado Denver. “We’ve always had to be really self-reliant because we’re kind of out here in the middle of this vast part of the country by ourselves.”
Linked to Chicago and the coasts by the Denver Pacific, the city boomed, growing twenty-six-fold in as many years. When Baedeker—the Frommer’s Guide of the era—visited in 1892, Denver had invested in paving many of its principal streets. A network of cable and electric streetcars fanned out “for all parts of the city” from where Union Station now stands and narrow-gauge rail service departed to Arvada, Golden and beyond. The city developed along the streetcar corridors, the suburbs along the light rail lines.
Rail transit investments and regional cooperation fell apart after World War II, like it did elsewhere in America. Governments at all levels encouraged highway and road construction and cars became widely available, enabling flight to the new suburbs that kept advancing across the prairie. Nationally, a holding company controlled by General Motors, Standard Oil and Firestone Tire gobbled up city streetcar companies with the goal of converting them to buses. The Denver Tramway Company, which operated 160 miles of track in its heyday, converted to diesel buses in 1950 and paved over its lines.
By the early 1970s, the baleful effects of these decisions were clear. Downtown Denver featured blocks of surface parking lots where once had stood historic homes and buildings. Traffic congestion kept growing and the city took over the bankrupt Denver Tramway Company. The relationship between the stagnating city and rapidly growing counties was competitive and often confrontational, even as an energy boom attracted people and investors to the region. Air pollution from automobiles was becoming hard to ignore, especially in the winter of 1971-72, when carbon monoxide levels broke federal standards on 108 of 183 days.
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Then two cataclysms struck that brought the Denver region together.
The first was the oil bust of 1983, a precipitous collapse in world petroleum prices that hit Denver like a neutron bomb. Exxon and other energy firms packed up shop and downtown office vacancies exceeded 30 percent, even as commercial rents fell by nearly half. The housing market tumbled. “The whole region was decimated and it was by far the worst recession since the Great Depression and far worse than the most recent one we’ve had,” says Schroeppel of the University of Colorado Denver. “There’s nothing like a really bad crisis to get people to see beyond their petty disputes.”
Economic development consultant Tom Clark arrived in town in the middle of the crisis. “We lost what little corporate leadership we had: They were running district offices and they just left town,” he recalls. “The head of the Denver Post left to run the L.A. Times. What we had left was the merchant class, those who depended on the area economy for a living.”
“After three years of finger-pointing trying to figure out who the hell screwed this up so we can drag them into the city square and tie them up and spit on them, people realized it didn’t matter; we had to move forward,” Clark, now CEO of the Metro Denver Economic Development Corp., says. “They looked around and they said: ‘This place has been boom and bust for as long as we can remember. The Gold rush. The silver boom. The three-legged stool economy of Coors, carbon and the Cold War, where the only one that was stable was Coors. We’re sick of this.’ So we got serious about diversity in the economy.”
The result was a great pact organized by the metropolitan chamber of commerce. All the cities and towns in the nine-county region agreed not to poach jobs and businesses from one another, but rather to work together within Clark’s economic development corporation to attract opportunities to the region or push for major collective investments like a proper transit system or a new airport to replace the aging Stapleton Airport. “The idea was that as we work together, everyone will get their fair share in the long run and collectively we’ll all gain by making the pie bigger,” Schroeppel notes.
“No more moving around the chairs in the Titanic,” Clark recalls. “And the ethics were: If you steal from someone else, you’re out of the family forever.”
Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine
The second disaster was in the air. The “Brown Cloud,” a dense haze of smog that blotted out the mountains for weeks on end, was reckoned by some measures to be the most severe in the nation. Caused largely by automobile emissions that had been rising steadily since the early 70s and the sand spread on winter roads, the Cloud was harming residents’ health, scaring off visitors and threatening millions of dollars in federal highway funds if federal pollution standards weren’t met. The day of reckoning had come. “There’s a feeling that we don’t have it made the way we did a few years ago, and a recognition that we’re not going to get back on an upward economic development spiral if we don’t do anything about air quality,” the head of the governor’s Metropolitan Air Quality Council, Michael Schonbrun, told a visiting New York Times reporter in 1986. “We were pretty slow in getting religion, but we certainly have religion now.”
The region took a range of actions to deal with the Brown Cloud, from restrictions on burning wood to mandatory emissions tests and the infusion of extra oxygen in winter gas, which helped engines burn cleanly in the thin air of a city that’s 5,600 feet above sea level. The measures worked, but the region kept growing, accelerated in part by the arrival of technology and aerospace companies. Civic leaders banded together in a successful campaign for a 0.1 percent regional sales tax to support cultural institutions like the zoo, performing arts center and botanical gardens. One effort brought together the twin imperatives of retooling the regional economy and cleaning the skies: building metro Denver a world-class transit system.
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At the outset, the Regional Transportation District had two strikes against it.
First, it had lost the trust of voters who in 1973 had approved a 0.5 percent sales tax increase in exchange for improvements to its lackluster bus system and the creation of a whiz-bang network of four-passenger “personal rapid transit” rail cars. “RTD’s inability to keep a clear and straightforward promise, together with its unforgiving collection of taxes morally tethered to that promise did not set well with the community at large,” the late Jack McCroskey, RTD’s former chair, wrote in his sharp-elbowed history of the era, Light Rail and Heavy Politics. Getting citizens to support another sales tax hike—even a smaller one—was nigh impossible.
Second, an army of critics insisted rail was a dead letter. “They loudly proclaimed that Colorado was not New York or Philadelphia or Boston, where people embraced and used mass transit; this was Colorado, where the car was king and transit was an unacceptable alternative,” RTD head Cal Marsella, who died in March, later recalled. “They eagerly awaited the opening of this ‘boondoggle’ so that they could verify their predictions of empty rail cars and empty parking lots.”
To prove the critics wrong RTD issued $116 million in bonds to pay for a pilot project, a mere 5 miles of light rail. The line ran south toward the sprawl, ending in a giant parking lot in a former industrial zone under Interstate 25. On opening day in October 1994, everyone at RTD held their breath.
“Ridership was off the charts almost immediately, and within five years it had quadrupled our original projections,” says RTD staff historian John Elias. Denverites loved the train. Buoyed by this success, RTD two years later won a $120 million grant to extend the line 8.7 miles southwest to Littleton, a $174 million project that would be completed in 2000 and more than doubled its expected first-year ridership forecasts.
Before shovels had dug into the ground, however, the district was campaigning for the Holy Grail: voter approval for a new 0.4 percent sales tax surcharge to pay for a $6 billion region-wide system. Voters rejected the proposal 58-42 in 1997, devastating transit boosters.
One of those boosters was the owner of a brewery pub in slowly gentrifying Lower Downtown. John Hickenlooper had often looked across Wynkoop Street at the half-derelict Union Station and dreamed of trains from across the Front Range disgorging customers straight to his dining tables. “I was shocked, and a lot of us said part of why it failed was that the suburbs and city hadn’t been working together on this,” he recalls. “I’d never run for student council or class president, but I decided to run for mayor.” He won the open position in the 2003 election, and proceeded to play the role of RTD ambassador to his 33 counterparts across the region in an effort to build support for a truly regional system.
Resistance, he learned, boiled down to this: “My little suburban enclave won’t have light rail coming to it, so why should my citizens pay this tax?” Backed by a set of traffic management studies, Hickenlooper argued to suburban residents that their taxes would encourage tens of thousands of drivers to get off the road and out of their way. An advertising campaign—financed by the economic development corporation—focused on commute times: “Stuck in Traffic? FasTracks is the Answer.” Along the existing line to Littleton, the message was reinforced daily by the light rail trains racing past stalled rush hour traffic on I-25 and Route 85.
“The unanimous support of the region’s mayors to support the FasTracks initiative was huge,” recalls Dave Genova, who was an RTD safety manager at the time and now heads the agency. “What we’d learned from the 1997 initiative was that people needed tangible details, comprehensive information about what they would be receiving and what it would mean to them.”
On Election Day 2004, the 0.4 percent sales tax referendum passed 58 percent to 42 percent—a perfect reversal of the failed vote seven years before—providing enough revenue to fund 122 miles of new rail, 18 miles of bus rapid transit and 21,000 new parking spaces at stations. Supporters—an unlikely coalition of mayors, business leaders and environmentalists—celebrated at a victory party at a bar in Union Station, which the RTD had purchased three years earlier and was now poised to resume its status as the region’s central transportation hub.
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Then it all came crashing down.
The financial collapse of 2007 and Great Recession threw RTD’s sales tax projections out the window, with its revenues falling short by $4.6 billion by 2009. Costs shot up $2.3 billion because of an unforeseen spike in construction material prices, increased land costs, and new safety federal requirements imposed after a terrible 2005 collision between freight and commuter trains in California.
“My first day in office I was confronted with the fact we had nothing under construction, a downturn in the economy, so not enough funding, a very, very upset stakeholder group, and the task of having to take some risks to get things started,” says Philip Washington, who took the helm of RTD in early 2009. “It was not a pretty time.”
The transit agency appeared doomed to renege again on its promises to voters. Polling showed going back to voters for more money would fail. “We sat down with Phil [Washington] on the 16th Street Mall and said, ‘Phil, we love you, but this thing won’t pass,’” Tom Clark of the economic development corporation recalls. “Here’s what we proposed: You get every nickel you can find from the feds, do every public-private partnership you can find, and then we’ll go back with you to the public.”
Fortunately, before the Great Recession, RTD had joined a Federal Transit Administration pilot program to explore the advantages and disadvantages of public-private partnerships, arrangements whereby private companies pay the costs of building and then operating a transit line for a fixed period in exchange for payments on the back end from the system’s public owner. In theory, such PPP arrangements could be attractive opportunities for companies, while relieving the public entity of upfront capital costs and later risks. RTD was willing to take the risk—after all, it needed a Hail Mary pass—but it had to compete with 15 other cities to win all or half of the program’s grand $1 billion demonstration grant.
One by one, however, the other cities fell by the wayside. Meanwhile, U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, by his department’s account, was wowed by a 2010 visit to Denver with his counterparts from the Environmental Protection Agency and Housing and Urban Development. “He told me he’d been to 212 metro areas since he’d become secretary and that this was the most collaborative region in the U.S.,” Clark recalls. “The other 15 cities blew up because it’s so difficult to build infrastructure if you don’t have collaboration in your community … We got the whole fucking billion!”
That was just the start. With a full-court press by Mayor Hickenlooper and Senators Mark Udall and Michael Bennet— FTA Administrator Peter Rogoff later said one of them called DOT every day— FasTracks also secured and combined grants and loans from the Federal Highway and Federal Railway Administrations, and, because of the shovel-ready character of its planned Union Station hub, stimulus disbursements. They did all this without increasing the sales tax. (The only segment that wasn’t funded was a 35-mile rail connection to Boulder and Longmont, northwest of the city. “That corridor is still the one we get thumped on the most,” RTD’s Donovan says. “But it’s the most challenging project because it will cost $1.1 to $1.4 billion to build.”)
Construction crews have been at work ever since and, if all goes according to plan, all the funded lines will be up and running by 2018, yielding a system of 77 stations and 114 miles of track in all.
There have been some problems, most embarrassingly when the crossing gates on the new line to the airport malfunctioned, forcing RTD to post guards along the route for the launch. But officials are confident these won’t become the kinds chronic issues that now plague aging systems in Washington, D.C. and Boston. Officials are equally confident they can avert those problems decades from now because of the way they have designed RTD’s finances. There’s a standing policy that total income must remain at 1.2 times construction and operating expenses, a ratio that will provide an adequate cushion for maintenance.
Now everyone is taking stock of what building Denver a system has meant.
Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine
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As the rails spread, observers began to realize that RTD and the city leaders had been thinking about it all wrong.
The system had been sold as a way to relieve highway congestion, and while its booming ridership figures had to be keeping some cars off the roads, experts say this was beside the point. Marilee Utter, a Denver-based vice president of the Urban Land Institute, says, “Most of the transit in the Western U.S. isn’t about mobility, because while we complain about traffic and it gets really bad in a few places sometimes, it isn’t really the justification for building six or seven corridors of rail. It’s really about economic development.”
Transportation planners have long known that you can’t beat highway congestion by building more and bigger highways because the new capacity is promptly met by a proportional increase in driving, a phenomenon known in the field as the “fundamental law of highway congestion,” and put forward by Anthony Downs back in 1962. Five years ago, researchers at the University of Toronto looked at detailed traffic data for cities across the United States from 1983 to 2003 that confirmed the law and found no evidence that the presence of bus-based transit reduced congestion.
Denver’s leaders had, by accident, built something extremely valuable, but because they had misunderstood its real purpose at the outset, some potential had been squandered. “They were really asking the wrong question: How do you reduce congestion on highways?” says Wesley Marshall, a transport engineer at the University of Colorado Denver. “The obvious answer is to put transit adjacent to highways and to surround the stations with park-and-ride lots.”
Problem is, while transit really does mitigate congestion in the long term, it does so by facilitating better, often denser land use, rather than by offering an alternative to getting from point A to point B on the interstate. Even as transit times have gone way down from Denver’s rail stations, Marshall notes, car driving times have gone up. Park and rides at inner stations have actually been shown to encourage net automotive use and associated pollution in studies by researchers at the Swiss Federal Energy Office and Erasmus University in the Netherlands. Marshall found this in Denver, too. Turns out people from the outer suburbs will drive past many stations until they reach a park and ride close to the city; if the park and ride wasn’t there, they’d have driven their car far less.
“If they had asked instead: ‘How do we increase accessibility, to get people from jobs to shops and activities,’ they would have gotten an entirely different solution set in terms of lines and where they go,” Marshall says. Cars, instead of being at the center of each calculation, might not have been a factor at all.
The stations themselves are the focal points, Utter says. “Transit puts a dot on the map for people to create a walkable place around, and around the country and around the word we are seeing that people want a sense of a village community, places where they can walk and where there is a mix of things to do,” she says. “When you design a transit system and identify the station areas, you’ve just identified an area of community investment. Because the most valuable real estate out there is the ‘walk to coffee’ environment.”
Only that isn’t what RTD was focused on until less than a decade ago. Long stretches of the system run down the middle of divided highways, where the right of ways were cheap. As a result, even the more successful “transit oriented developments” (T.O.D.s, among the cognoscenti) had unnecessary weaknesses. Take the area around the main station in Englewood, a suburb on the old southwest line, completed in 2000. The city built an attractive village-like neighborhood on the site of a failed mall. But because the station and the neighborhood were planned separately, RTD’s parking lots are located in such a way that commuters can bee-line from train to cars without ever setting foot in the development. “If they had people walk past the coffee shop and then to their car, these would be functional places,” Marshall sighs.
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When he took over RTD in 2009, Philip Washington aimed to change all that. “I’d always thought that we transit agencies and authorities had to be more than just the T in T.O.D.,” he says. “If we have a station property, the idea is not to go into a community and just independently develop your piece of the pie. We want to work with the community on how to develop it within the fabric of their community, and to my mind that included affordable housing and walkability and nutrition in terms of stores so that it’s not a food desert.” He emphasized the creation of station area plans that sought to incorporate land owned by other public entities, or even blighted properties that could be purchased by partner agencies.
One of the best examples of this is the area around the 10th and Osage Station just south of the city center. The Denver Housing Authority wanted to replace the South Lincoln Homes, a distressed, low-slung 270-unit public housing project on 15 acres with mixed-income housing. The two key criteria critical to attracting middle- and market-rate tenants, DHA Director Ismael Guerrero says, were proximity to downtown and a light rail station, but they also wanted to ensure nobody was unwillingly displaced.
“This is a close-knit community and a lot of history, where people live for generations and have family close by,” Guerrero notes. “Residents told us they wanted to make sure that we weren’t just replacing housing but improving the quality of life.”
The result is Mariposa, a 900-unit development of energy-efficient three- to nine-story buildings with shops and office spaces mixed into a network of parks, bike paths and community gardens, some of them on land transferred by RTD to the city. Osage Café, a breakfast and lunch place, is actually a culinary academy training local teens. Arts Street, a non-profit providing arts-oriented “learn and earn” sessions for at-risk youth, moved into the complex from temporary digs at DHA’s invitation.
“People wanted job training opportunities to ensure self-sufficiency, which became a guiding principle in the plans,” recalls Kimball Crangle, who was DHA’s project manager for Mariposa for many years. “A lot of times these things get dropped in the face of budget pressures, but that’s the thing about establishing guiding principles: it keeps it in the conversation.”
Mariposa, now nearly complete, has retained more than 40 percent of South Lincoln Homes’ residents, Crangle notes, about four times the national average for similar projects. The net result has been diversification, not just gentrification, according to Todd Clough, executive director of the nearby Denver Inner City Parish, which helps the poor. “I was anticipating eight or 10 years ago that we would be gone by now, but because of light rail and Mariposa, we’re still relevant,” he says. “I’m a cynic; I serve poor people, that’s what I do. But, you know, this project is about as good as you can do it in a city that’s on fire.”
The paradigm shift has also paid off in more affluent areas like suburban Arvada’s Olde Town, an old streetcar suburb with an attractive main street district. RTD’s G line will bring rail service back when it opens later this year, which has local merchants and restaurateurs anticipating a regionalization of their customer base. But town officials wanted to improve on what RTD could afford to provide at the station: a bus stop and a nine-acre surface park-and-ride lot down a steep hill from the platform. So they kicked in $30 million to build a multistory parking garage-cum-bus station, freeing the nine acres around it for apartments, stores and a hotel to be built.
“We’re investing to enhance the station so we could provide not only a better experience for transit users, but a development that is characteristic of how Olde Town Arvada has evolved,” says city manager Mark Deven, who estimates resulting private investments in the hundreds of millions.
It’s also paying off in places where there’s never been anything at all, like the area around the newly opened Peña Station, just shy of RTD’s airport terminus and embedded in airport owned land. “Here we had a station in the prairie and we had to figure out how to make the most of it,” says Kim Day, Denver International Airport’s CEO. Denver International owned 60 acres around the future station, but partnered with a private developer to create a 400-acre site.
This was hugely appealing to Jim Doyle. The president of Panasonic Eco Solutions, which was headquartered in Newark, New Jersey. Doyle was looking for a place to move his division, which deploys large solar panels and battery storage systems. “We had this fast growing division that’s very people and engineer intensive and uses a lot of land, so we needed to be in the Midwest,” he says. By August 2014 he had narrowed his search from 22 cities to two: Denver and Dallas. Dallas offered tax incentives. But Panasonic’s top brass in Japan had been looking for somewhere to create a North American version of the company’s Fujisawa Sustainable Smart Town, 30 miles outside Tokyo, where solar-panel topped buildings, infrastructure and even household appliances are managed by Big Data and the Internet of Things. Denver’s rail-centered greenfield site, right next to an airport with nonstop service to Tokyo looked perfect. “We came out to Denver and the mayor, the governor and the senators all said, ‘Yeah, let’s do something here, let’s do something that’s a real showcase, that people will actually fly into Denver to see,’” Doyle recalls. “That just tipped the scales.”
Panasonic Eco Solutions headquarters opens next to Peña Station later this summer. Ultimately, a master-planned, high-tech neighborhood of hotels, businesses, homes and corporate offices is supposed to spring up around it. Cameras and sensors will tell drivers where the nearest open parking spot is, or inform the snowplow when it needs to clear a street. “If there was no train station, there would be no value to this place,” Doyle notes.
As for the airport itself, Day has been looking to Amsterdam and Frankfurt for examples of transit developments at airports. “There are so many businesses today that want to sit on or near an airport because we are essentially so global,” she says. “It’s the train that lets us attract them.”
Kansas is starting to feel a lot farther away.