Mason Street corridor a savior?

Thoroughfare planned as bypass to heavy traffic

It’s been a long, hard life for College Avenue.

The Fort Collins drag – U.S. Highway 287 – works day and night, pumping lifeblood into the city’s business heart. To date, the artery has been siphoning cars, trucks, buses, bikes and even buggies north and south for more than 100 years.

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But, the stress is beginning to show.

At its peak, the strip is a river of cars, moving sluggishly under a shroud of exhaust for more than six miles like creeping lava. For many it’s an all-too-visible symptom of Colorado’s fastest-growing city’s growing pains. Fort Collins grew by 27.6 percent during the 1990s, according to U.S. Census information, outpacing Denver and Colorado Springs. Consequently, a section of pavement just south of Prospect Road now carries about 57,000 cars on an average day, according to city statistics.

While growth and traffic numbers continue to speed ahead, traffic itself is slowing down.

The artery is beginning to clog.

That prognosis could hold drab implications for business along the corridor. The artery that supports more than 60 percent of Fort Collins’ employment is choking on its own prosperity.

“As the city continues to grow there will be more and more congestion on College that will interfere with the viability in those districts that the artery supports,´ said Dan Gould, a citizen who is working with the community to solve its congestion woes. “That could eventually stagnate business along that corridor.”

Aiming to ensure future business health and tame commuter headaches, Fort Collins is performing bypass surgery, stringing an alternative transportation corridor along Mason Street, just west of College Avenue, from Cherry Street to Harmony Road. The new vein is the city’s less expensive answer to light rail, and if completed, it will funnel bicycle, pedestrian and bus traffic away from College Avenue to reduce the strain on the system.

Wait, hold your applause College Avenue drivers. The traffic will not be letting up any time soon, said Susanne Durkin-Schindler, Mason Street project coordinator for the city of Fort Collins.

“Every time you take a car off of College Avenue another one replaces it,” she said. “College Avenue will remain congested, but the important thing is that the system will see relief.”

The Mason Street corridor, which is scheduled for completion in 2010, is set up to accommodate a high-frequency bus route directly east of the existing street and a snaking bike and pedestrian path on the west side. So, while Mason Street will not take any additional cars, it will provide a north-south transportation alternative. Essentially, Durkin-Schindler said, the corridor offers “increased mobility,” opening the roadway to automobiles that need it like freight trucks and delivery vehicles.

Mobility comes with a price tag, though, $50 to $60 million dollars to be exact. With environmentally friendly buses priced at about $350,000 apiece and each pedestrian underpass requiring $250,000 in funding, mobility isn’t cheap.

The city of Fort Collins fronted the bill for the first two phases of the project through its 25-cent Building Community Choices sales tax that voters approved in 1997. That well will run dry at $9 million, though, sufficient only for completion of the bike and pedestrian throughway. Funding for the remaining dearth rests on a financial foundation that will remain an enigma until at least 2003. Relying on a New Start Grant from the Federal Transit Committee, the city will continue with the project until then, anticipating that the 20 percent/80 percent matching-funds grant will come through.

“We’re confident that the grant money will come,” Durkin-Schindler said. “We have an advantage because most projects like ours are huge. Ours is unique in that it can accomplish quite a bit for a small grant.”

The city’s confidence should be music to the ears of business owners near the corridor, said Ray Moe, project manager for LSA Associates – a consulting firm hired by the city of Fort Collins to evaluate the viability of the Mason Street project.

The project, which focuses on “transportation-oriented development,” may increase access to existing businesses while lacing a series of enhanced-development centers along the new vein like pearls on a necklace.

“The areas that surround the transit stops will most likely become little nodes of activity,” Moe said. “The area around the stations could be subject to redevelopment and intensification. It may be possible to replicate an Old Town feel at some of these active areas as Fort Collins continues to grow.”

At least one local entrepreneur is ready to cash in.

Meg Cattell, a Fort Collins veterinarian, is working with the city to plan a series of coffee kiosks that will tap into the new Mason Street market at major transit stops and pedestrian intersections, serving up latte to blurry-eyed commuters.

“This is going to change the way people think about shopping and business in Fort Collins,” she said. “The areas around the transit stops really can do nothing but grow. The new design specs are really trying to encourage businesses to be accessible to pedestrian and bike traffic.”

The transportation corridor could create a unique business situation in Fort Collins. By linking periphery retailers to the downtown core, the corridor may make it easier for locals and out-of-towners to navigate the city.

“The corridor could establish (Fort Collins) as a very special kind of retail destination,” Gould said. “Someone could park at Harmony Road, take the bus downtown for dinner then shop at the Foothills Fashion Mall without having to put up with traffic and congestion.”

The linchpin of the corridor’s success, however, is alternative-transportation use. Most experts are projecting heavy use for the bike-and-pedestrian path, but the bus line remains suspect.

“There is no way of knowing if people are going to use the bus system until it’s there,´ said Fort Collins Mayor Ray Martinez. “But it’s like when we build roads. People always say, ‘Why did you build a road there, nobody will use it.’ I’ve never seen a road that people didn’t use.”

Currently, the area around Colorado State University, which experiences the highest levels of alternative-transportation use, is still dominated by 60 percent automobile travel. Thirty-three percent of CSU trips are made by bike or on foot, but a mere 4.4 percent of the trips are made by bus.

The Mason Street bus line will differ drastically from the current Transfort system, though. The high-frequency bus route will operate consistently and separate from automobile traffic, making it more desirable, said Transfort General Manager Tom Frazier.

While the current system carries 1.5 million passengers a year, Frazier expects the Mason Street line to haul more than 5,000 people a day.

“There is plenty of justification for thinking that this system will work,” Frazier said. “What has happened across the country is that when you put a high-frequency transit system in a corridor you will record high levels of transit ridership.”