Longmont officials who complain about the Regional Transportation District (RTD) not building them a train remind me of petulant children whining because their parents won’t buy them a toy that all the neighboring kids supposedly have. Apparently, the prestige of having your city served by a transit system that was obsolete in the mid-20th century outweighs logic and common sense.
In the early 2000s, when RTD was trying to persuade voters to approve a FasTracks tax to build new rail transit lines, transit was carrying 4.8 percent of commuters in the Denver urban area to work. Rail proponents promised that RTD would build the lines on time and on budget and that trains would dramatically relieve congestion by taking hundreds of thousands of automobiles off the road.
Almost as soon as the votes were counted, RTD announced the rail lines would cost far more than expected and that it could not possibly complete them all on time without more money. An RTD analysis found that the Longmont rail line would cost more than $60 per rider, six to ten times as much as most of the other lines, so RTD decided to defer construction of the Northwest line.
A spectacular failure
In 2019, after all the lines except the one to Longmont had been completed for several years, census data revealed that the share of Denver-area commuters who took transit to work was still only 4.8 percent. Spending billions of dollars on new rail lines did not take one single car off the roads!
The reasons for rail’s spectacular failure are simple and predictable (in fact, I predicted this in 2004). First, rail transit, particularly light rail, is low-capacity transit. In fact, the “light” in light rail refers not to weight but to capacity: as defined in the American Public Transit Association’s 1996 transit glossary, light rail is “light capacity rail transit.”
RTD likes to call light rail high-capacity transit because a four-car train can hold more people than a bus. But for safety reasons, trains must be spaced several minutes apart from one another, while buses can run just seconds apart. Portland has buses on city streets that can move more people per hour than any light-rail line. Bogota has busways that can move more people than New York City subways.
The Denver-Boulder urban area has more than 2,400 miles of streets suitable for buses, but rail transit can only run on dedicated rails. If transportation patterns change, as they did due to the recent pandemic, bus routes can change overnight, but rails take well over a decade to plan and build.
RTD spent billions of dollars building 110 route-miles of rail and for most people the trains just don’t go where they need to go. Most of RTD’s rail lines meet in downtown Denver, but before the pandemic less than 10 percent of the region’s jobs were downtown.
RTD’s downtown bias can be seen in the numbers. Before the pandemic, 22 percent of downtown workers took transit to work, but less than 3 percent of workers in the rest of the urban area commuted by transit. Rail transit simply doesn’t work for most of the 90 percent of people who aren’t going to or from downtown.
Buses can be faster, more frequent, and more flexible than trains at a far lower cost. For a fraction of the cost of rail lines that only serve a few people, RTD could have greatly increased ridership by massively beefing up its bus system with frequent service to every part of the region.
One of RTD’s promises was that it would increase bus service if voters approved the rail tax. That’s important because to be successful, rail transit must be supplemented by lots of feeder buses. However, due to rail’s cost overruns, RTD buses operated 10 percent fewer miles of service in 2019 than in 2005, which is one more reason why RTD failed to take any cars off the road.
Doubling down
The bottom line is that RTD’s rail lines failed to solve any of Denver’s transportation problems and were really built solely to enrich contractors and rail car manufacturers.
Despite rail transit’s failure, people are advocating for a Front Range Commuter Rail system that would cost tens or hundreds of millions of dollars and run a handful of trains each day. Minneapolis has a commuter-rail line like this one that the state is expected to cancel because it carries so few riders.
Commuter trains in Albuquerque, Nashville, Orlando, Portland, and many other cities have also failed to perform as promised. Some carry so few riders it would be less expensive to give each daily round-trip rider a new Toyota Prius every year than to run the trains.
If Longmont really needs better transit service, it should use buses. For a fraction of the cost, frequent direct buses from Longmont to downtown Denver, the Lakewood Federal Center, the Denver Tech Center, the Denver International Airport, and other important job centers would do more to help commuters than an expensive train.
Randal O’Toole is director of the Independence Institute’s Center for Transportation Policy and the author of Romance of the Rails: Why the Passenger Trains We Love Are Not the Transportation We Need.
