The Regional Transportation District and I go way back. Long before light rail came to the I-25 corridor, I was a regular on the express bus between the ‘burbs and downtown.
As a single mom working for a series of ridiculous bosses at the Denver Post, the bus commute often was the only sane part of my day. I would find a seat, pop my ear buds in my head and read the newspaper in peace for half an hour between the chaos of getting two kids off to school and the insanity of daily newsroom deadlines. It was Valium on wheels.
My companions on the bus included attorneys, accountants, city employees, college students and a novelist who wrote his books in longhand in a notebook on his way to his day job.
We all knew the rules: greet each other only when boarding and leaving the bus and avoid idle chitchat. Interrupting a passenger’s sacred commuter time was like farting in the elevator. Rude.
When I moved to the city, I switched to the No. 6 bus, which included a lot more young people along with the attorneys, accountants and city employees since Denver Public Schools relied on RTD instead of creating wasteful overlapping bus services. I learned that eavesdropping on middle-schoolers’ conversations was waaaay more entertaining than my usual audio fare of music and news.
And now from my downtown address, I rely on RTD to transport me from Union Station to the airport without the hassle of I-70 traffic and paying for a parking space. I also hop on the 16th Street shuttle if my bag of groceries is too heavy to carry home, if it’s 100 degrees — or snowing — or if I’m just not in the mood to walk.
So, I take the transit crisis facing Denver personally. And I’m pissed.
In 2004, the region’s voters made it clear they wanted modern transit services instead of more ozone, more brown clouds and more congested freeways. They approved a sales tax to help fund an initial $4.7 billion budget for building light rail, expanding bus routes and bringing our then-rapidly expanding cow town into the 21st century.
It was a collective fever dream of can-do optimism that’s hard to imagine as we remain fixed in our bleak MAGA cut-public-services-with-a-chainsaw doom spiral.
And, incidentally, it helped our state in ways no one could have anticipated. While the rest of the country slogged through the Great Recession in 2009, the infusion of billions of dollars for building light rail kept the region’s economy afloat.
We have ourselves, the taxpayers, to thank for that. We were visionary back then, confident and scrappy.
But COVID changed everything.
Remote work led to fewer commuters on the mostly hub-and-spoke system. Reliable hordes of daily commuters like I was for so many years disappeared. Workers abandoned the office, stopped seeing themselves as part of a professional community and hunkered down at home alone with their Labradors and their laptops.
Ridership plummeted in 2020 and never recovered. It is still down about 40% from 2019 levels.
Add to that the fare increases, staff layoffs and service cuts, and the resulting doomsday loop of fewer riders leading to fewer buses and trains followed by even fewer riders and more service reductions threatens to sandbag the whole system.
Despite several measures to prop up RTD funding, including exempting the agency from making TABOR refunds, imposing a fee on oil and gas production to support clean transit, increasing fares and trolling for federal funds, RTD is running on empty.
Colorado ranks 44th in the nation in support for mass transit and, clearly, all the budgetary sleight-of-hand in the world can’t close the gap. RTD’s shortfall is something like $250 million.
But everybody knows more ham-handed service cuts will only make things worse. That’s one thing on which we all can agree since we have plenty of data to prove it. So, we have to come up with a better idea.
OK, OK, some service reductions absolutely make sense.
The rail line between Westminster and Union Station is an indisputable failure. So few people take the train on the B Line that each ride ends up costing the agency $48.40. The plan to run the trains all the way from Longmont to Denver never materialized, and the good folks of Westminster don’t use the service. Better to put it on ice until gas hits $10 a gallon.
A few bus routes with per-rider costs over $10 should be rerouted, rescheduled or otherwise re-evaluated for their usefulness.
But even talking about eliminating the free 16th Street Shuttle to save money is absurd. It has the highest ridership of any route in the system. It would be the ultimate reverse marketing strategy. To save $9.5 million, RTD would alienate 2.3 million tax-paying riders a year. There’s gotta be a better way.
Maybe for starters, some of the extravagant subsidies for driving cars and trucks in the U.S. could be redirected toward mass transit. Few countries in the world lavish as much in public funds on personal vehicle use as in the U.S.
Gas taxes and fees on vehicle registrations are estimated to pay for only about half the cost of road maintenance and construction, leaving the rest to be financed by taxpayers. Zoning regulations requiring free parking, huge police departments to enforce traffic laws and manage vehicle accidents, and defense spending to keep the flow of oil through such hotspots as the Strait of Hormuz are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to subsidies for the automobile.
Worst of all, drivers are held harmless for the trillions of dollars in environmental damage they have caused from polluted neighborhoods to ozone emergencies and — most catastrophically — climate change.
If we want a future, mass transit is not optional.
It would be government malpractice to allow $5.5 billion in sprawling modern public infrastructure to drift into irrelevance, to fail, at a time when gas prices are up, affordability is a critical problem across the state, the region’s gridlocked highways are like parking lots for hours each day and Denver logs more than 30 days of dangerous ozone alerts each year.
You’ll never convince me there’s no choice but to cannibalize RTD. Save it.
Diane Carman is a Denver communications consultant.
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