Critical Conversations in Transportation Planning: Jill Locantore

[00:07] - Em Hall: Welcome to Critical Conversations in Transportation Planning, where we're bringing you a series of interviews with pioneers and industry leaders who are offering their insights into some of the most challenging issues facing our field. This podcast is produced by the American Planning Association's Transportation Planning Division. TPD connects planners working across all transportation modes to share innovation, foster collaboration, and advocate for sustainable mobility solutions. I'm Dr. Em Hall, an urban planning consultant and member of the TPD Board of Directors.

[00:37] - Divya Gandhi: And I'm Divya Gandhi, a transportation planner and a member of the TPD Board of Directors.

[00:42] - Em Hall: In this episode, we speak with Jill Locantore of Denver Streets Partnership.

[00:47] - Divya Gandhi: We've really enjoyed this conversation, so let's get right into it.

[00:51] - Em Hall: Jill, thanks so much for joining us here at the National Planning Conference, also Denver, which is your town where you're working in right now. Tell us a little bit about what you do in your position, the work your organization is doing, and where you got to where you are today.

[00:01:06.920] - Jill Locantore: Sure. Yeah. So the Denver Streets Partnership is a coalition of community-based groups that are advocating for people-friendly streets here in Denver. Our collective mission that we're working towards is reducing Denver's unsustainable dependence on cars and prioritizing people in the design of our transportation system and our communities more generally. So that means advocating for policies and practices and investments that make it safer and more convenient to walk, to bike, to take transit, and that think about our streets as public spaces, not just conduits from getting from one place to another.

[01:46] - Em Hall: That's great. And then how did you end up in this role? What's your background in planning, transportation? What brings you here?

[01:51] - Jill Locantore: I do have a master's degree in urban planning, and I started in the public sector. So I worked for the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments in Washington, DC, and then worked for the Denver Regional Council of Governments here in Denver, and then switched over to the advocacy side. Yeah.

[02:09] - Em Hall: How's that transition been for you? Why did you make that transition?

[00:02:13.400] - Jill Locantore: Some of it was frustration with the public sector and how car-centric planning is. and as a public sector planner, there's definitely opportunities to be an internal advocate within your organization. But at the end of the day, you serve at the pleasure of the elected officials in your community. And I wanted to be in a position to advocate more directly to those elected officials rather than just taking their instructions.

[02:39] - Em Hall: That's great, you know how things work on that side, too.

[02:41] - Jill Locantore: Yes, it's very helpful having been inside government to understand how to effectively influence from the outside.

[02:49] - Em Hall: Excellent. Great. Wow.

[02:49] - Divya Gandhi: Thank you, Jill. You describe Bus Rapid Transit as a key tool for achieving Denver's Vision Zero goals, especially in high-injury corridors. Can you share how BRT can be designed not just as a transit solution, but also as a safety intervention?

[00:03:04.500] - Jill Locantore: Yes. One of our big focuses right now is improving transit in the Denver area, both through infrastructure improvements, primarily through bus rapid transit. So just converting existing roadways to have dedicated lanes for the busses so that they can be faster, more frequent, and more reliable. And then also increasing funding for transit operations so that those busses in the dedicated lanes aren't coming once an hour, but they're coming every 5 to 10 minutes. They're coming all day long on weekdays and weekends so that we can get to the point where transit is truly useful to people and actually competitive to driving in terms of how easy it is to use transit to get to your daily destinations.

[03:51] - Em Hall: Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. So we're here with the Transportation Planning Division. We've had a couple of walking tours. I'm from Indianapolis, for So I see Denver as a transit-rich environment compared to where I'm from, right? And yet walking around, there's this pedestrian mall ends here, and then there's a block of cars, and then the next one picks up, and then headways, and then all this different stuff. Tell us how you even identify... How do you identify the need when there is, I would argue, a decent amount of transit? And then how do you make the case for, this is great, and we need more. How do you go about doing that in this environment?

[04:30] - Jill Locantore: There's really a lot of untapped potential for transit ridership here in the Denver area. One of the challenges is our transit agency, the Regional Transportation district or RTD, it's one of the largest in the country, geographically speaking. It covers a very large area that includes not only central Denver that's very urbanized and relatively dense, but also lower density suburban areas and even some rural areas. And so there is a tendency to spread the peanut butter to make sure that we're serving all parts of the region, which means we've really underinvested in the core part of the region where there is tremendous potential ridership, but the system isn't really set up today to serve that high ridership potential.

[05:17] - Em Hall: Yeah, because driving around town seems pretty easy, honestly. Kind of convenient. What are you doing? What stories are you telling? What inducements are you making to address that that desire for mode shift? You got a little carrot and stick going on, right? So what are you doing to tell or convince people to get out of the cars and get on transit?

[05:40] - Jill Locantore: Well, I mean, ultimately, we don't want to convince people out of the goodness of their heart or altruistic reasons to use transit. We want to make transit a truly practical and convenient and pleasant way for people to get around. And it's not that in Denver right now, because we've under-invested for decades in our transit system. So the service is not that frequent. There's many routes where the bus only comes once an hour. It stops running after 5:00 PM. It only runs on weekdays. And therefore, it's just not that useful for the trips that people need to make. And it's not that dignified either. We have thousands of bus stops that are literally just a stick in the mud. And there's not a place to sit. There's no shelter from the weather. There's not good lighting or a trash can. And so we're really treating people who depend on transit today like second-class citizens. And of course, people are not choosing to use that system when it's designed to treat you like a secondary interest in our overall system, as opposed to prioritizing people who are taking transit. Yeah.

[06:47] - Em Hall: I love that notion of dignity. I mean, it'd be easy to look around and say, I see tracks, I see busses. Great. It's all fine, right? But if your experience is really inferior, there's just not a lot of reason to hop on that bus.

[07:01] - Jill Locantore: Unless you're truly dependent, and that's just a really terrible way to treat people who don't have any choice other than to use transit, is to treat them like they don't deserve the same respect or level of amenities as other people using our transportation system. So true.

[07:16] - Divya Gandhi: You've also described Bus Rapid transit, BRT, as a key tool for achieving Denver's Vision Zero goals, especially in the high-injury corridors that have been identified. So, Jill, can you share how BRT can be designed not just as a transit solution, but also as a safety intervention.

[07:35] - Jill Locantore: Yeah. A lot of our corridors that do have the highest ridership potential because that's where so much of the density and the destinations are that people are trying to get to, those are streets that are designed like highways. In many cases, they literally are state highways, controlled by the state Department of Transportation. They've, for many decades, they've been designed and managed to move as many vehicles as fast as possible, which is just inherently in conflict with creating a safe pedestrian main street environment. And key to transforming these streets to truly be safe, as opposed to the location where the vast majority of our traffic fatalities take place, is completely rethinking the design of those streets and reallocating the space. So instead of having six, eight, or sometimes even 10 lanes of vehicular traffic. Oh, my gosh. Taking some of those lanes, converting them into dedicated bus lanes, wider sidewalks with street trees, where possible, even bike lanes on those corridors. So you're still moving a lot of people, but in a much more efficient and safe way to move people down those corridors that's consistent with the adjacent land uses. These are truly the streets that have the potential to be great vibrant main streets with shops and restaurants, apartment buildings, social services, all the things that people want. But right now, they're adjacent to a deadly highway. And so it's just a real mismatch in our system right now.

[09:13] - Em Hall: So we here as transportation planners and folks who work in the field, there are myriad reasons for and against BRT, and we'll talk a little bit about the reasons against. But I'll be honest, I haven't heard safety as a leading reason for BRT. As we talk, it makes a lot of sense, but often it's faster or other things. Tell us specifically why leading with the safety story for BRT is so important for the work you're doing in the region.

[09:38] - Jill Locantore: We really have a public health crisis of traffic fatalities. Nationally, there's more than 40,000 people who die every year in preventable traffic crashes, and they are, in fact, preventable. We know where the fatal crashes are most likely to occur. They are on these highway-style urbanized streets. We know the strategies for making those streets safer is redesigning them to prioritize people outside of cars to reinforce slower speeds on those streets. We see that in action right now in Denver. We have a bus rapid transit line under construction on Colfax Avenue. During construction, they've reduced the number of travel lanes to make room for the construction. It's mimicking what it'll be like once the bus rapid transit is up and running with fewer travel lanes just for general purpose vehicles. And a local journalist just did an analysis and showed that with this current configuration of fewer travel lanes, there are the lowest number of crashes on that street since the depth of the pandemic, basically, 2020, when we saw a huge decrease in traffic crashes because, again, fewer people were driving. Basically, cars are the most dangerous element in our transportation system. 99% of the traffic fatalities in Denver involves somebody driving a personal vehicle because it's thousands of pounds.

It can go 60 miles an hour. We're pretty liberal in giving out driver's license to people who may or may not be qualified to drive in a safe manner. And so the more you give people viable options other than driving, the safer our system is going to be just inherently.

[11:20] - Em Hall: Is that a valuable proof point then? What that journalist has discovered, what you all probably know anyway, but it sounds like that could help make the case for a future or additional BRT.

[11:30] - Jill Locantore: Well, and hopefully once it's actually designed, the full design is built out, so it's not just slower for the general purpose traffic, but then we also have the dedicated bus lane. You can see side by side the contrast of, if you're riding the bus, it's fast, it's frequent, it's reliable, it's safe. That's another interesting data point is literally zero people have died while riding transit here in Denver since we committed to Vision Zero back in 2016. That's incredible. Meanwhile, hundreds of people have died using other modes because they've been hit by a car while using those other modes.

[12:08] - Divya Gandhi: I have a follow-up, quick follow-up. Jill, you've talked about implementing BRT in a single lane can present such a great opportunity for upgrades that are in the surrounding street network that connects to that corridor for multimodal connectivity. So how can cities ensure that investments like BRT, which are really huge investments, also lead to improved pedestrians, bicycling, and local transit infrastructure in a way that it creates a more holistic network?

[12:40] - Jill Locantore: Yeah. It's important to think about Bus Rapid transit not as just a treatment to one single street, so the bus on Colfax Avenue or Federal Boulevard here in Denver. But to think about the network of streets that connect to it, because everybody who's using that transit system is going to be a pedestrian at some point in their trip or a bicyclist going to and from the transit stop and then to their final destination. And so you need to have safe pedestrian and bike connectivity for that last mile surrounding the transit corridor. And you also need to think about how is this shift in terms of reducing the number of vehicular travel lanes on a major material going to affect the adjacent streets. The fear is you'll get diversion of vehicular traffic to those adjacent streets, which may It may or may not come to fruition, depending on how successful the transit is in attracting new riders. But we can be proactive in preventing that from happening in the first place by doing a lot of really robust traffic calming on those adjacent streets. So it's just not an attractive option to divert off of the main street onto a parallel street because there's speed humps or diverters or other mini traffic circles that really reinforces the character of those streets.

They're for local trips. They're not for long haul through trips. And through combining all these different strategies together, you're really prioritizing the bus as the most convenient way for people to travel long distances along the corridor and then encouraging people to walk or bike for those shorter trips along the corridor.

[14:16] - Em Hall: That's great. It sounds like communities are starting to embrace this vision. What would have been some of the biggest obstacles to overcome? Like business community in particular? That's often a tough one with BRT, right?

[14:27] - Jill Locantore: There is the perception that a lot of customers get to the business by driving, which is not always connected to reality. There's some good data that shows that business owners tend to overestimate how many of their customers drive. But because they believe that, that can lead to a fear that making it slightly more difficult to drive, and we're really talking about slightly more difficult. It might take you 30 to 60 seconds longer to get your destination. You might have to park a little bit further away from your final destination. We're by no means making it impossible to drive, but the perception is by making it slightly more difficult to drive, somehow this is going to discourage customers. Often that doesn't turn out to be the case, but that's the perception ahead of time. And so it takes political leadership to be able to say, I hear you, and we share that concern, but we don't believe, based on the data and the experience in other cities, that that is actually going to happen. So bear with us. Let's give this a try, implementing Bus Rapid transit and see what actually happens. And then the other concern is during construction.

This is a multi-year construction project, building out Bus Rapid transit. And so how can we support businesses during that time frame? Denver has actually been really rather progressive in this regard in terms of establishing a dedicated fund that provides grant monies to businesses that We can demonstrate that they've lost business during the construction period, which is a lot more than what other cities typically do. It's still probably not quite enough if we truly care about making sure that the businesses that are here today are able to survive the construction period and then benefit from the final improvement to the street. We're always pushing for the city to do more and has even suggested that they model something after the 1% for the arts program that's already here in Denver. If a project is above a certain dollar amount, 1% of the funding has to be set aside for adding art to the community in conjunction with the transportation project. We'd love to see them also have a 1% anti-displacement fund that can support businesses and also adjacent residents who might be struggling with increasing property taxes or other costs that result from infrastructure improvements in their neighborhood and making sure those people can stay and benefit from the improvements.

[16:56] - Divya Gandhi: Jill, you also talked about design changes and completely rethinking design and reallocating roadway space. And Denver is working towards implementing the safe systems approach, including self-enforcing streets that naturally slow traffic without relying on any automated enforcement or police enforcement. So what are some key design strategies that are being used and have been successfully implemented? And how do they end up contributing to both safety and transit efficiency?

[17:27] - Jill Locantore: Well, we'll find out with the bus rapid transit. That's really the first time we're making a significant change to an arterial street. Probably the closest example to that that we've done so far in Denver is on Broadway, which is a major north-south corridor. The city recently added a two-way bikeway on one side of of Broadway, which required reducing a travel lane in order to add that two-way bikeway. And in that case, we have seen virtually no impact on travel speeds along the corridor. These streets are so overbuilt and usually have more capacity than truly needed, but also have seen a major safety improvement from just reducing the number of through travel lanes in terms of reduced crashes along that corridor. Most of what the city's Vision Zero efforts have focused on to date are what I would call the lower hanging fruit of traffic calming treatments on quieter neighborhood streets. So adding things like speed humps or mini traffic circles or diverters that are intended to really reduce the speed and volume of traffic, vehicular traffic on those streets. Those streets aren't necessarily where we're currently seeing a high number of traffic fatalities, but they're also important because they're part of the larger network that people need to feel comfortable walking and biking in order to get to the mode shift that we need to reduce the number of cars on the road so that we have less dangerous missiles driving around our transportation system.

It's also about the livability of the neighborhoods. Nobody wants to live on a street where cars are zooming past at 40 miles an hour. Everybody wants to live on a quieter street where they feel comfortable gardening in their front yard, walking their dog, allowing their kids to play without being in fear that a high-speed vehicle is going to either create a lot of noise or disruption or actually harm somebody on their street. So all of this traffic calming, it's not just about people walking and biking. It's about actually making the neighborhood a more comfortable place for people to live.

[19:35] - Em Hall: Absolutely. Yeah. So you've got a lot of very specific to Denver things going on here, but I think there's a lot that other cities and municipalities could take away? You're in the early stages of BRT and some of these other initiatives, but are there some things you've learned so far in your current role that you're like, please, other people, take this, go do it. It works. What would you share to folks looking Denver as an example of XYZ in transit.

[20:03] - Jill Locantore: Well, I would definitely encourage other cities to start with fast and low cost treatments. A lot of people like to complain about things like white flex posts and rubberized curves because they're ugly. But when we're talking about traffic safety, I feel like esthetics should be on our list of priorities. And what those fast and low cost improvements allow you to do is test out street designs and make sure that they're truly achieving the intended outcome. And what are the most effective ways to reallocate street space to reinforce slower speeds, to make people feel comfortable walking and biking. And so, for example, recently, the city shifted from using pinch points as a strategy for trying to slow down traffic, so having bulb outs in the middle of the street, and instead, favoring speed humps in the middle of the block as a more effective a way of reducing vehicular speeds and volumes because they tried out both. They were able to assess the actual impact of those treatments and also public perception of those treatments. They found that the speed humps were both effective at reducing speeds and were better liked by the people in the neighborhoods who got them.

So by using, instead of moving the curb and doing a very expensive infrastructure project to create these permanent pinch points, they just use flex points, or the flex posts. They tried it out. They're like, it worked okay, but we've got other treatments that work better. And so being willing to experiment, evaluate afterwards, iterate and hone in on what are the best solutions, I think is a really effective way to start making your street safer.

[21:45] - Em Hall: It's so important. It's a really good example. As a cyclist, I appreciate that. I get nervous sometimes when everything narrows and I'm like, oh. So, yeah, that's great. I mean, I will say walking around downtown, it's been a pretty low stress experience. I know we're here on a weekend and things like that, but it's been really pleasant to be around downtown, I think. So, yes, it's working.

[22:06] - Jill Locantore: And there's been a lot of reallocation of street space downtown. There are some major arterial streets that used to be five lanes wide downtown, which is absurd. No downtown should have a street that wide. But now they've started reallocating that space for bus lanes and bike lanes and reducing the number of vehicular travel lanes down to three to two. And It has the intended effect. It slows down the vehicles. It makes it more comfortable for people to walk and bike, and it encourages people to actually reconsider what is the best way for me to get from point A to point B. Again, they're not changing their behavior because we're asking them to, and they're being responsive to our plea, please try and consider using some other mode. They're just making this decision that's rational for them, and we're setting it up so that modes other than driving is the rational best choice for more people. important.

[23:00] - Em Hall: That's so important. That's great.

[23:01] - Divya Gandhi: Wow. Thank you, Jill. I know we talked a lot about BRT, the fact that BRT is not just about moving people efficiently, but can be really seen as a powerful tool for traffic safety. I don't think we've heard it from that lens. So thank you for sharing that perspective, Jill. Really cool to see our streets also not just as one corridor where the implementation occurs, but also seeing other streets that are connecting to it and the entire network that we can plan safety for just by the means of a new system coming in one long corridor. We're curious, what's next for Denver? There's a lot of cool projects happening. There's a lot of implementation that might be needed. So where are we headed?

[23:46] - Jill Locantore: So one of our big focuses right now is significantly increasing the funding for transit operations here in Denver. As I was saying, we have a lot of busses that serve neighborhoods throughout the region, but only come once an hour, don't come every day of the week, don't come late into the evenings. And a big reason for that is there's just not enough money. And it's not a one-time investment. It's not like a capital project where you can spend $200 million and then you're done. Then you move on to the next thing. But it's an ongoing need. You have to pay the bus drivers. You have to maintain the vehicles in order to provide that level of service. My organization and several of our coalition partners just released what we called our transit vision of what would be possible if we were to significantly increase our investment, specifically in transit operations, with the idea, can we get to the point where the majority of people who live in the Denver Metro area are within walking distance of a bus that comes at least every 15 minutes. So frequently that you don't even have to look at a schedule.

Exactly. Just like when you grab your car keys, you don't need a schedule of like, when is my car going to be available? You just know it's going to be there in the driveway. How can you have that same level of confidence that you can walk out your door within a quarter mile, reach a bus stop, and know a bus is going to come within 15 minutes? That's the point when people can rely on transit like that. It becomes an obvious choice for them to use on a daily basis.

[25:24] - Em Hall: It's tremendous. Wishing you great luck in that in Denver. Endeavor in Denver. Combining my words there. This has been really insightful. I think you all are doing tremendous work here and definitely some new ideas. I like the test and fail and fix and change fast. And I think we get so concerned about, oh, Is it going to be the right thing forever? It doesn't have to be. Let's figure that out. That's an excellent advice.

[25:50] - Jill Locantore: Yeah, our streets are dynamic places. And we should start thinking them about them that way. How do they continue to evolve over time? And they can be different things at different times of year or different times of day. We don't have to think of them as literally set in concrete and never to be changed again. Absolutely.

[26:09] - Divya Gandhi: A hundred percent. Wow. Well, thank you, Jill.

[26:12] - Em Hall: Thank you, Jill. It's been a pleasure.

[26:14] - Jill Locantore: Thank you for having me.

[26:17] - Divya Gandhi: Thank you for joining us for this episode of Critical Conversations in Transportation Planning. To learn more, visit the APA's Transportation Planning Division website at transportation.planning.org.