Rail transit group asks for injunction to halt Union Station FasTracks work
A pair of loaders scrapes the area north of Union Station where the design calls for excavating to build an underground bus station for FasTracks. Work began on Monday. Inside Lane photo.
By Kevin Flynn
Inside-Lane.com
A group of rail transit advocates asked a federal judge on Tuesday to stop FasTracks construction at Denver Union Station until the court can rule in a lawsuit seeking to overturn the environmental approval for the work.
Colorail – the Colorado Rail Passenger Association – sued in U.S. District Court in Denver last May claiming the Federal Transit Administration should not have approved the Environmental Impact Statement that RTD produced for the $480 million project. RTD, along with its partners Denver, CDOT and the Denver Regional Council of Governments, is converting Union Station into the hub of most FasTracks rail lines.
An E Line light rail train prepares to depart for Lincoln Station from Denver Union Station, while a mall shuttle takes on passengers. Inside Lane photo.
The Union Station Neighborhood Company, the master developer chosen to do the work, began early site construction this week in the large open area – where railyards used to be – north of Union Station where an underground bus transfer facility is planned. That is what prompted Colorail to file for the temporary restraining order.
You can read the 25-page court filing here.
You can read the original lawsuit here.
You can read the Union Station environmental impact statement here.
And you can read the FTA’s Record of Decision approving it here.
Colorail has longstanding objections to the design of the transit facilities and maintains that it wasn’t properly reviewed in light of requirements in the federal National Environmental Policy Act that requires such studies. The FTA issued its approval on Oct. 17, 2008.
This true-perspective view from the existing light rail platform at Union Station looks northwest to where it would be relocated for Fastracks, to right in front of the freight cars where the concrete pipes are lined up. Inside Lane photo.
Chief among Colorail’s complaints is that the new design will rip up the existing light rail platform and relocate it two and half blocks north, near the pedestrian Millennium Bridge and along the freight railroad tracks, to make room for the heavy rail platforms of the north metro FasTracks corridors.
They would be connected by the underground bus station and grade-level plaza planned to run along the 17th Street axis. That is the site where early construction began this week.
Colorail wants a new environmental study.
Backers of the Union Station design, including RTD and Denver’s newly created authority overseeing the redevelopment, Denver Union Station Project Authority, maintain that the law was properly followed. Delay at this point, RTD says, would delay completion of the station improvements necessary to stay on schedule with FasTracks corridors. The West Corridor light rail is currently under construction in Denver, Lakewood and Golden with an opening in mid-2013 that would bring its trains into the station. The East Corridor heavy-rail commuter train to Denver International Airport is supposed to be done the following year.
The case is before Judge John Kane.
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The present tracks are now too far from the station and accesses to Downtown and the idea of moving the tracks about two blocks further is very wrong. Obviously the people doing the design are people who never ride transit. The object is to make the station location as close and walk able to the destination as possible, not impose an extra walk of several hundred feet. It is time to go back to the drawing boards and if anything move the current tracks closer to the station. The LRT 5 mph curve at 16th street needs to be straightened out and move the tracks to the area where the Sky Train (Hopefully to start again soon) and Amtrak tracks are now. Or, over the former railroad right of way between Pepsi Center and Union Station. The Sky Train, Amtrak and the new FasTrack will have to be on the distant new UP railroad alignment with the moving sidewalks etc between the railroad, bus, LRT and Union Station. The 16th St maul bus can still have stops next to the LRT and FasTrack stations.