Alvin Bridal Sanchez, a DRCOG staff member, told the Denver Regional Council of Governments Board of Directors on July 2 that scenario modeling for the 2050 regional transportation plan shows “land use is not the primary driver of mobility changes” and that transportation strategies combined with land use changes produce the largest shifts in travel patterns.

The presentation summarized three transportation scenarios and one land-use scenario and compared each to the adopted 2050 regional transportation plan (RTP) and current land use forecasts from the Colorado Department of Local Affairs. Sanchez said the region’s latest forecast assumes about 800,000 additional residents by 2050 and slower growth than earlier projections.

The board was shown three primary mobility measures: vehicle miles traveled (VMT), vehicle hours of delay, and transit/walk/bike trips. Under the RTP with current land use, DRCOG staff expect VMT to rise roughly 25 percent and vehicle hours of delay about 54 percent by 2050. The transit/walk/bike measure is forecast to increase about 41 percent.

Sanchez described the scenarios as follows: a “complete streets” scenario that adds bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure, assumes more e-bikes and e-scooters, increases telework and reconnects neighborhoods across limited-access highways; a transit scenario that expands fast tracks and commuter rail, grows bus rapid transit and high-frequency corridors, expands microtransit, implements zero-fare policy and improves 8,000 bus stops; and a limited roadway expansion scenario that removes regionally funded roadway capacity projects from the adopted RTP.

Key differences in outcomes included: the complete streets scenario combined with focused land use produced larger gains in transit/walk/bike trips (staff showed as much as a 117 percent increase over 2023 in the complete-streets-plus-transit combination) and reduced the pace of VMT growth (to about 15–17 percent in some combinations). The transit scenario alone held VMT growth to about 5 percent relative to the RTP baseline and in some model runs reduced delay compared with 2023 levels. The limited roadway expansion scenario—removing regionally funded roadway widenings—showed little reduction in VMT and an increase in delay (to roughly 73 percent in the modeling example), indicating that eliminating capacity projects alone did not shift substantial travel to transit, walking or biking at the regional scale.

Sanchez emphasized that the scenarios are “what if” exercises, not a set of proposals to be selected as-is: “we will not be selecting one of the scenarios that you’ll be seeing before you today as our scenario moving forward.” He said the scenario work is intended to guide the candidate-project solicitation and policy guidance for the RTP update.

Board members asked technical and policy questions. Director Levy said he was “kind of blown away by how clear the data is and how clear the results are,” and asked whether past modeling had isolated land-use effects; Sanchez replied that four or five years ago land use had been a stronger driver but that much of the region already has higher zoning and that further mobility gains now require complementary transportation investments.

A staff member on the land-use team, Zach, noted that “there are differing growth rates across this region,” and that the regional scenarios use regional control totals but that follow-up work uses county controls and small-area forecasting to reflect subregional growth differences. Jacob, the executive director, told the board that DRCOG is accounting for demographic shifts including growth in the older-adult population and that those changes are modeled to influence travel behavior.

The presentation also highlighted microtransit as an example of neighborhood-level impacts that the regional travel model cannot fully capture; staff said microtransit deployments could yield about 150–250 additional rides per microtransit service per day in a community and that those connections can matter locally even if they are small relative to regional trip totals.

Sanchez outlined next steps: DRCOG staff will prepare a scenario planning report, continue runs and analysis, share results with technical advisory committees and the Regional Transportation Committee, and use findings to shape the upcoming candidate-project solicitation for the RTP. He asked the board and committees to consider whether project types or evaluation metrics should be adjusted in the solicitation process.

No formal vote or policy adoption occurred during the work session; the presentation and committee discussion were informational and intended to inform subsequent planning steps.

Ending: DRCOG staff and board members said they will continue committee-level discussions, produce a report on the scenario work, and begin the candidate-project solicitation later in the RTP update process.