Interview with Paul Sizemore: Department Head for Transportation Planning
Paul Sizemore is the department head for FC moves, which is the transportation planning for the city of Fort Collins. Sizemore has lived in the city now for 6 years and started working for the city right when he moved here. He has really enjoyed working for the city and watching it grow. He moved from Grand Junction, CO and said that “…the city streets there can learn a little bit from Fort Collins.” This interview took place face to face in a conference room right across the hall from Sizemore’s office. The main points discussed were the strengths and weaknesses of the road system in the city.
Beyond the Oval: What is a brief history of Fort Collins infrastructure?
Paul Sizemore: Fort Collins is like a lot of other Western Towns, it was originally laid out in the 1800s. The founding fathers laid it out in a very typical kind of way, you can even go back and look at those documents. Fort Collins has a grid pattern that you see throughout the city. They wanted to have wide streets so that you can turn a stagecoach around. A comment made by a lot of people, “…Wow your streets are so wide here.” I like that anecdote because it shows how over time that was the benefit they were looking for in that period. Here we are now, 100 years later, because we have such wide streets we are able to put nice wide bike lanes.
What is the biggest challenge in the street system within Fort Collins?
I mentioned that we have these wide streets that do give us some space to accommodate different ways of transportation, but at the same time there are limits to how much you can continue to widen the streets. This is not a problem that is unique to Fort Collins, that is problem with any growing city.
There is something called induced demand. If you have a street that is really congested, there is a lot of traffic or a lot of cars, some cities will just go and widen that road. At first its great because there is a lot more space so cars are able to go faster. Now that a city has added this extra capacity and the street is so much easier and faster to drive on it will draw people in. It attract more people to use it. This road is inducing more demand.
The formula of widening roads forever does not work because of this. You can not just carry everyone on a road. Public transportation is a way of being more efficient. Every person on a bike is one less person in a car.
That is a challenge but also part of the excitement of the job.
What are the challenges of keeping the infrastructure proportional to the population growth?
So much of transportation infrastructure comes down to funding. How are you going to pay? Part of that is, we have laws in place so that when new developments happen they pay their way for the infrastructure. Built into our development process there is something called a traffic impact study. That is one tool to identify if a particular development will cause a delay at an intersection to be unacceptable. The developer might have to pay to upgrade that intersection.
Likewise for sidewalks. If there is a missing section between that neighborhood and a school. The developer might need to build that connection.
In addition developers also pay a capital expansion fee, a more general some of money. This is also called an impact fee. That is money that goes to the city to address more general transportation demands around the city. Some things you can directly link to the development and other things are just accumulative.
You can run into a challenge where there is a really expensive project that needs to be done. No one development can pay for it, then the city has to get involved and find ways to combine the money to be able to pay for that big project.
What are some of the remedies to relieve traffic congestion?
It is really easy to zero in on the traffic on a particular street and see what we can do better to make the traffic flow faster. Some of that is really helpful and worth doing, but the bigger solution is can we give people different options for how to get around? Building out the transit network, generally something that we hear a lot is the buses need to run more frequently. The buses go where they are suppose to go people just want them to run more often.
For example, what is wonderful about the Max is that it runs every 10 minutes, so you don’t need to look at a schedule. You can just walk up and get on and if you miss it do not worry there will be one coming in five minutes. That is very different from one that comes once an hour. Increasing frequency on transit routes makes it so that they are usable for people. That is a big picture solution that gets to the route of the problem.
If we can make it easier for people to ride the bus, or ride a bike, or walk. People do not need necessarily to drive a car, of course some people will always be in a car.
On a smaller scale, we have a whole department of the city called traffic operations. They are the ones who run the traffic signals, they have a whole tool box of different things that you can do. Sometimes it is as simple as adding an extra turn lane in an intersection.
There may be a whole bunch of traffic in an area and it is really just because at this particular intersection there is a lot more people turning right than you have capacity for. In those cases you go in and put in a right turn lane. It relieves congestion on the whole street. A good example is the intersection of shields and plum because there is constant congestion in those turn lanes.
Traffic operations also has a tool of adaptive signal timing. We have a couple places in the city where they have started to implement it. Four years ago the city council approved the funding for some down on Harmony road.
Instead of the signal running off of a set phasing plan it actually uses real time data on the traffic going through it. Then can adjust to the way the signal operates. That way it can move the cars through it more efficiently.
How is the infrastructure comparing it to the cities surrounding Fort Collins like Longmont or Loveland?
Well I am a little bias, of course! Just because I live and work here. I think that we can objectively say that we have pretty excellent infrastructure. There is some ways where can objectively say that. So our streets department here that maintain the actual asphalt on the surface of the roads win awards regularly from national organizations who looks at the quality of the road surfaces.
In conclusion Sizemore would like to add that the infrastructure of Fort Collins is world class and that is something every city strives for. The term “world class” is something that people like Mr. Sizemore and other city staff members use internally to try to achieve. The city of Fort Collins aspires to be the best they can be and establish that they are leading the way in infrastructure.
If you would like more information about the transportation system in Fort Collins visit https://www.fcgov.com/transportation/
