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Thad Noll appointed to Colorado’s High Performance Transportation Enterprise

Assistant County Manager Thad Noll was appointed by Gov. John Hickenlooper to Colorado's High-Performance Transportation Enterprise last week.
Courtesy of Thad Noll |

Gov. John Hickenlooper appointed Assistant County Manager Thad Noll to the state’s High-Performance Transportation Enterprise last week. The enterprise, also known as HPTE, was created in 2009 as business within the Colorado Department of Transportation to help finance public transportation projects.

According to a statement from Hickenlooper’s office, Noll was selected for his expertise in transportation planning, local government and several other areas.

“The board will focus on everything statewide,” he said. “I’m partially representing the I-70 corridor. And that will likely be a corridor for testing new programs, and testing new innovations.”



One of those projects concerns the future of connected vehicles, where information on road conditions can be transmitted from one vehicle’s computer to another vehicle’s computer. Information could also be transmitted from road infrastructure, such as traffic lights, to vehicles.

He added a pilot project for connected vehicles, called “RoadX,” will be tested along the I-70 mountain corridor.



“I hope we can get people excited about Colorado being a very innovative state in the area of transportation,” he added.

HPTE has also helped fund several other projects across the state since its creation, including the I-70 Mountain Express Lane, which is set to be fully functional by Dec. 12. The government-run enterprise funds projects through user fees and revenue bonds, with collected fees going back directly to the project. The tolls collected by HPTE from the express lane, for example, will fund project costs and maintenance of that segment of the corridor.

The board, which meets on a monthly basis, may also seek out public-private partnerships to finance these improvements.

“It can look at more innovative means of financing, and can allow the state to get infrastructure built much more quickly, in some cases,” Noll said. “It allows this board to do faster action things that require a little more agility, that maybe the state as a whole is not set up to work that quickly.”

He attended the first board meeting on Wednesday, Nov. 18. His term with HPTE will continue until October 2019.


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