Transportation policy used to have a fairly uncomplicated purpose: move people safely, efficiently and reliably. Build roads where people drive. Maintain bridges before they fail. Add capacity where growth overwhelms the system. Provide transit where it makes sense.

Infrastructure was supposed to accommodate human behavior.

Colorado increasingly prefers the opposite arrangement.

Today, transportation policy is used not merely to serve the way people travel, but to change it.

Colorado’s Greenhouse Gas Transportation Planning Standard requires transportation planners to meet greenhouse-gas reduction targets. The old question was: where are people going, and how do we help them get there?

The new question increasingly becomes: how do we get them to travel differently?

That is a change in mission.

Consider the proposed Colorado Boulevard Bus Rapid Transit project.

CDOT currently estimates the project at roughly $215 million for about 7.5 miles of corridor. The existing bus route carries about 3,000 riders per day. Meanwhile, Colorado Boulevard itself carries between roughly 21,000 and 68,000 vehicles per day, depending on location.

CDOT believes improved service could substantially increase transit ridership. Good. If better buses persuade people to ride because they are faster, safer and more convenient, that is transportation choice working exactly as it should.

But another possibility being studied involves repurposing existing roadway space for dedicated transit and other multimodal uses.

That brings us to a distinction worth making:

Improving transit is transportation policy. Making driving less convenient so transit becomes relatively more attractive is behavioral policy.

If reducing vehicle miles traveled becomes an objective, the incentives change.

Slower driving, scarcer parking, removed lanes and repurposed roadway capacity can all influence behavior.

No conspiracy is required. The policy framework does the work.

And the public appears to understand the trade-off. In written comments obtained and reviewed by CBS Colorado during early public engagement, 74% opposed the Colorado Boulevard BRT proposal while just 10% supported it. It was not a scientific poll, but concerns repeatedly included congestion, lane reductions and damage to small businesses.

Those concerns deserve more than a public engagement checkbox.

Transportation projects do not occur on spreadsheets.

They occur in front of somebody’s business, somebody’s home and somebody’s driveway.

Corridor redesign can mean fewer parking spaces, altered access, restricted turns, years of construction disruption and displaced traffic.

For a planner, these are design variables.

For a small-business owner, they can determine whether a customer stops or keeps driving.

For a homeowner, they can determine whether traffic migrates onto neighborhood streets.

The benefits are advertised collectively. The burdens are imposed individually.

A transportation model can calculate vehicle movements. It cannot calculate the value of a customer who never comes back.

Then there is the language: mode shift, travel demand management, road diet, multimodal corridor, VMT reduction.

They sound antiseptic.

Translated into ordinary English, they often describe attempts to get people to make different choices.

Behavioral engineering apparently just needed better branding.

There is also an inconvenient geographic reality.

Colorado is not Manhattan.

The Front Range is a sprawling network of workplaces, neighborhoods, schools, hospitals and suburbs. A nurse may work across town. A contractor carries tools between job sites. A parent combines school, work, groceries and activities into a single automobile trip.

Transit can serve some trips very well.

It cannot serve all of them.

A transportation planner can eliminate a traffic lane. He cannot eliminate the reason you needed to make the trip.

The same philosophical conflict surfaced in the debate over Initiative 175.

Our proposed measure sought to direct specified existing transportation-related revenues more firmly toward roads, bridges, maintenance and roadway safety. We withdrew it after state leaders committed to pursuing short- and longer-term strategies for increasing road maintenance and repair funding.

The ballot fight ended.

The argument did not.

Initiative 175 exposed a larger question: what is transportation money actually for?

Colorado has an enormous existing road system requiring continual maintenance simply to preserve the mobility people already depend upon.

At the same time, the state is investing in transit expansion, electrification, multimodal corridors, bicycle infrastructure and policies intended to reduce automobile travel.

Some may be worthwhile.

But there is a fundamental tension between maintenance and transformation.

One asks how we preserve the transportation system Coloradans use today.

The other asks how we construct a system encouraging Coloradans to behave differently tomorrow.

Every dollar has an alternative use. Every lane has an alternative use. Every project reflects a priority.

Before government spends hundreds of millions transforming how citizens travel, it is reasonable to ask whether it has fulfilled the more basic obligation of maintaining the infrastructure those citizens already paid for.

That is not hostility toward transit.

Build good transit where demand supports it. Build bicycle infrastructure where it makes sense. Repair bridges. Maintain pavement. Improve intersections. Add capacity where growth requires it.

Then let citizens decide.

A transportation system should expand choices, not make one choice progressively worse until another becomes attractive.

Nor should businesses and homeowners along a corridor be expected to absorb the costs of someone else’s transportation experiment.

Colorado once focused on moving people.

Increasingly, it seems determined to manage them.

So the next time you are sitting in traffic beside a lane repurposed in the name of changing transportation behavior, consider whether what looks like poor planning actually reflects a different definition of success.

The traffic jam may not mean the policy failed.

The traffic jam may be the policy working exactly as intended.

Michael A. Hancock writes a column every other Thursday for the Denver Gazette. He is a retired high-tech business executive and has been a Coloradan since 1973.