Aspen Gets Us There event garners community input to improve parking, transportation needs

In what was Aspen City Council’s first look at the master parking and transportation plans of the Aspen Gets Us There project, council members agreed during Monday’s work session they would like to see staff continue moving forward with progress made before returning in late summer with action-oriented plans designed to give the council additional options.

One of its top priorities has been to improve transportation throughout the city. In order to achieve this purposefully, staff has been tasked with designing a holistic plan to include both parking and transportation while heavily considering public input. 

“I think the big question that we were asking during the meeting was: Can we set parameters?” said Pete Rice, director of transportation and parking. “The council decides what those parameters are, so that we can manage a system more fluently, and it’s not so codified to where we can’t maneuver. We’re trying to handle a system that was developed over 20 years ago that served its purpose back then but essentially needs some updating.”

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He said staff’s goal is to “squeeze improvements” from the parking and transportation programs to determine how to even further improve upon programs. He added staff’s goal for City Council during Monday’s meeting was to collectively conceive of an overall vision of their plan. 

Mallory Baker with Walker Consultants has been working with staff since November. She started Monday’s meeting by outlining the project’s timeline from fall of 2023 through the winter, which was focused on data collection and analysis and examining example practices from 29 different communities facing similar and different challenges as Aspen.

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She explained from that point, a vision and guiding principles were established during a period of heavy community input. With the help from various focus groups, she said it made it easier for everyone involved to visualize the same goals of the project. She further added that City Council feedback was now especially critical due to many of the project’s ideas currently standing in conflict.

“There’s a tension of providing parking while holding true to some of the transportation demands and management sustainability goals of the city – some of these things are in conflict,” she said.

Baker said the project is a system that a lot of communities want to emulate, especially in a rural environment where the transit system can be looked at as exemplary. On the parking side, she made a point of acknowledging Aspen as being an “innovator over the years.” She said Aspen was one of the first communities to: tie parking management to Transportation Demand Management, leverage smart multispace meters in the US, digitize its parking system, and implement a form of demand based pricing.

She then moved into addressing three of the “heavy” topics within transportation: service standards and route review; carshare expansion through a private operator; and expansion of the Downtowner, Aspen’s free, on-demand ride service within the downtown core and several surrounding neighborhoods.

One of the things that continually came up during the project’s public feedback period was wanting an objective understanding of transparency and how decisions are made concerning empty buses or overcrowding.

Baker said that towns like Fort Collins have service standards and have developed a way to apply the service standards, so they have quantitative metrics and a process by which the town can review and adjust routes if those standards aren’t being met. 

Mayor Torre expressed the concern of varying routes having varying populations that are served within different densities and conditions. 

“When we talked about setting up service standards, I would want to be sure that the service standards are applicable to the individual routes, neighborhoods that are served, et cetera,” he said. “It would not be one service standard that I think oversaw all those routes.”

Another point of interest, Baker said that based on community feedback received, Aspen’s car-share program is incredibly popular and is the only municipally-run car share program in the US that she and her team have been able to find so far.

Also enormously popular among focus groups and community participants is Aspen’s Downtowner and its anticipated expansion. She said one of the hurdles to expanding the Downtowner is finding ways that maximize community goals; one of the “critical opportunities” the Downtowner supporting and serving would be first/last-mile connection to transit especially in parts of the city that don’t have proximal access of a quarter mile or more to route transit.

“Some neighborhoods may even fit that bill where they might want some kind of first/last-mile connection to transit that could help them become more frequent transit riders and enhance their access to core services and to regional connections like the transit center,” she said.

On Tuesday, staff hosted two separate events to offer residents an opportunity to learn more about the strategies being considered to improve Aspen’s transportation and parking. An open house was held at the Aspen Police Department Community Room and a pop-up event was held at Rubey Park.

Rice said the Rubey Park pop-up event was more geared toward the transit downvalley commuters and the people using the buses, whereas APD open house usually attracts the more local crowd. Attendees were given a chance to meet with city staff, transportation experts, and project partners with planned coverage of current initiatives and feedback on proposed strategies. 

“Honestly, it’s always a challenge because people want to get into the details,” he said. “People want to talk about street corners and personal issues, you know, so it’s a challenge to kind of bring this back to a holistic view of ‘What is the goal and what are council’s values on this?’ I think we got a lot of information about where their values stand right now. We’ll develop a plan based on that, and it’ll be an interesting work session in the late summer.”

To reach Jonson Kuhn, email him at jkuhn@aspentimes.com.