Conjuring up the dreaded specter of Los Angeles, environmentalists and business leaders are joining hands to urge voters to approve on Tuesday a $16 billion plan to graft a hub-and-spoke light-rail system onto Denver's booming metropolitan area.
"Light rail will help us from becoming another L.A.," said Lauren Martens, an environmentalist who worked for the coalition, Transit '97. "We face the danger of choking in smog and traffic congestion, of destroying our open spaces and communities with sprawl."Denver's light-rail plan, one of the most ambitious in the nation, reflects the West's sharpening love-hate relationship with mass transit. Over the past year, voters in Phoenix rejected a light-rail plan, and voters in Portland, Ore., rejected a plan to expand its light-rail system.
At the same time, Salt Lake City broke ground on a 15-mile, $290 million north-south line. Last month, Boise residents tried out an experimental commuter train on freight tracks in the city.
Denver already has a small light-rail line, with 5.3 miles of track. And next week, regardless of Tuesday's vote, bulldozers will start preparing track bed for an 8.7-mile extension, for which money is committed.
But some in Denver want the project to stop there.
"People who don't use transit love trains," protested Jon Cal-da-ra, who is drumming up anti-rail votes under the slogan, "Don't Buy the Lie." "About 98 percent of people around here have never used transit. This is the West."
In 1980, Denver area voters rejected a plan to build a $1 billion, 73-mile light-rail line. In a poll last week, surveyed voters narrowly favored the $16 billion plan, which calls for 93 miles of rail lines and car-pool lanes.
The difference in attitudes is the tale of Denver's growth.
Since 1980, greater Denver's population has increased by 50 percent, to 2.1 million. During that time, miles traveled on roads have increased almost twice as much.
Nationwide, according to a Federal Highway Administration study of 50 metropolitan areas, the portion of urban freeways clogged during rush hours has increased from 55 percent in 1983 to almost 70 percent today.
In Denver, the increase has been sharp: from 4 percent to 54 percent. During Denver's traffic jams this year, drivers will burn up about $1 billion worth of gasoline, feeding air pollution, known locally as the "Brown Cloud."
At Denver's notorious "Mousetrap," the junction of two interstates, traffic is running at 340,000 vehicles a day, triple the level of 1964.
As traffic speeds slow and rush hours expand, road rage has reached "epidemic proportions," according to the Colorado State Patrol. Going after reckless weavers and high-speed tailgaters, the patrol issued 18 percent more nonspeeding tickets last year than in 1995.
Easygoing Denver is starting to see its first Los Angeles-style freeway shootings. Last week, two Denver area men were charged with murder in the shooting of a driver on I-25, the state's busiest highway.
With 1 million new residents expected to join greater Denver's population over the next 25 years, it would seem easy to win enough votes to raise the region's transit tax by two-thirds, to one penny on the dollar. Business groups have raised $550,000 for the transit campaign, outspending their opponents 12 to 1.
The light-rail plan has the support of the region's most powerful politicians. Colorado Gov. Roy Romer is to join Denver Mayor Wel-ling-ton Webb for a publicity ride on the city's electric rail line.
But a feisty, guerrilla-style campaign led by Caldara is throwing the outcome into doubt.
"We are looking to the 19th century for solutions to our 21st-century problems," said Caldara, who represents Boulder in the six-county Regional Transportation District. He counts among his supporters tax protesters, automobile commuters and one of the city's two daily papers.
"It will put a dent in your wallet, not in the traffic," he added, noting official estimates that a light-rail system would only pull 50,000 cars off Denver highways by 2020. Paying people to car pool would be cheaper and would take twice as many cars off the roads, Caldara said.
Indeed, car pooling is a popular transit alternative in the West. In Salt Lake City, traffic delays mounted this year with the reconstruction of I-15. Car pooling jumped by 25 percent.
Rush-hour tolls, four-day work weeks, car-pool and bus lanes, and onboard computers mapping uncongested traffic routes would ease Denver's traffic woes, Caldara said. He added: "We don't have to build new highways. We have to focus on highways during the three hours a day when they are congested."