Roadways for People: The Necessity of Collaboration

Eagle County, Colorado, is perhaps what many people who haven’t been to Colorado think is Colorado: towering Rocky Mountain peaks topped with snow—the backdrop of an ultimate outdoor adventure at ski resorts such as Vail, Beaver Creek, and Avon.

The dozen or so towns and unincorporated communities in Eagle County are spread across the approximately 1,700-square-mile region that sits almost 150 miles east of Denver.

“The area here is kind of a hamlet structure that’s rather large with a lot of open space and [scattered] towns,” says Morgan Beryl, who at the time of her interview was the director of community development for Eagle County. “It’s pretty auto-dependent if you want to get between towns, and there’s some culture issues related to using public transportation.”

Home prices close to the resorts are out of reach for most people who work at them, making commutes through the mountain roads to less expensive areas of the county necessary.

Of the approximately fifty-five thousand residents of the county, 29 percent identify as Latino. The county is quite wealthy, with a median annual income of over $79,000. However, the number of Latino people in Eagle County living in poverty is double that of White residents who live in poverty in the region.

The bus is the main public transit option in the region. Vehicle ride-sharing is another option, and local bike-share programs help in getting to and from bus stops or ride-sharing locations. Most of the bus riders are lower income, with 52 percent of winter riders and 60 percent of summer riders earning below $30,000 per year, as Eagle County learned when it conducted a survey in 2018. Because the region is home to many popular ski resorts, the number of part- time residents (who are generally more high income) is higher in the winter—27 percent, versus 11 percent in the summer, which accounts for the difference in income percentages of riders between the two seasons.

In a place such as Eagle County, where the travel mode of choice for the higher-income, White majority is the car, there is a risk that the needs of public transit users will be overlooked in favor of solutions that are more driver friendly. But Eagle County government, through the leadership of chief culture officer Angelo Fernandez, navigated these challenges through collaboration. Fernandez fostered a strong team environment between the county government’s nearly twenty-four departments, including transportation, housing, planning, public health, emergency management, and children, family, and adult services, which helped to develop and support creative solutions related to public transportation. The collaborative team approach helped to build trust internally and led to much more effective community engagement to understand the concerns of county residents and what needed to be done to address them.

“The strings that pull through all of this is equity,” says Fernandez. “That leads us to ask, ‘Does everyone have the same access to opportunity?’” With that as its overarching value, the county prioritized looking into public transportation challenges faced by the Latino community, since they make up the majority of bus riders.

Read the full excerpt at Planetizen.