Early this week, Colorado’s Front Range Passenger Rail District released its Plan for Colorado Connector – CoCo, the name it has given to a proposed passenger train between Fort Collins and Denver.
The plan calls for spending $332 million in phase 1 (three trains a day each way), $1.7 billion for phase 2 (extending trains to Pueblo), and $2.7 billion for phase 3 (increasing frequencies to up to 10 daily roundtrips).
My first thought is that, as someone who actually went to planning school for a year or so before becoming disillusioned by the profession, I resent it when government agencies call documents like this “plans.” A real plan considers a wide range of alternatives, carefully evaluates the benefits and costs of each alternative, and then, as a part of implementation, sets up targets and a monitoring process so that it can change or cancel the plan if it fails.
The money train
This document contains none of that. Instead, it simply proposes to spend a lot of money, after which it would spend a lot more money, and then spend even more money. No alternatives are considered and there is no suggestion that if the first step in the project fails in some way they will modify or abandon later steps.
In short, this is not a plan; it is a sales brochure designed to convince legislators and the public to pay for expensive train service that few people will use. The train is needed, the document claims, because “congestion is climbing.” In fact, the train will do nothing to relieve congestion. The document further claims that every dollar spent on a train will generate $5 in “economic returns,” when such numbers are entirely fabricated.
The document makes a point of saying that people will be able to ride the train to football games and concerts at the Broncos Mile High Stadium. Let’s see: the typical train will carry 500 or maybe 600 people, while the stadium has 76,000 seats for football games and 85,000 seats for concerts. So a trainload of people isn’t even going to fill 1 percent of the seats. During phase 1, the state will own only one train, but even in phase 3 it will probably only have six or eight trains, and even if all trains were diverted from their usual duties to go to the stadium, they wouldn’t fill many of the seats.
To justify its proposals, the document cites the growth in ridership of the state’s subsidized bus service as well as subsidized train services in other parts of the country. But the growth rates shown are from 2021 to 2025 — in other words, all of the claimed growth is really just recovery from the pandemic. How about a comparison of 2025 to 2019? In almost every case, ridership today will be lower than before the pandemic.
With no information about how the number was calculated, the document predicts that, after phase 3, the trains will carry more than one million one-way trips per year. Considering that RTD’s light-rail system carries more than 11 million trips per year, that doesn’t sound like much. Yes, the CoCo trips will be longer, but for most of that distance they will be outside of the urban areas whose congestion they are supposed to relieve.
Reality check
Spending $4.7 billion on passenger trains that will produce so few benefits is ridiculous, but voters should know that the cost is likely to be a lot more. Denver International Airport was supposed to cost $2.9 billion; it cost $2.0 billion more. “Fastracks,” Denver’s regional rail transit plan, was supposed to cost $3.8 billion for six major lines and three minor extensions; so far Denver’s Regional Transportation District has spent $5.5 billion and says it will need another $1.6 billion to finish all of the lines.
In short, the District wants to spend more than $4.7 billion on trains that aren’t going to relieve congestion, generate economic development, or bring many people to sporting events and concerts. I am sure we all could think of a lot of better ways to spend that money that will produce far greater benefits, but the “plan” failed to consider any alternatives.
We would also like to think that, if hardly anyone rode the trains in phase 1, the District would decide not to waste any more money on phases 2 and 3. But the “plan” contains no monitoring program or targets and experience shows that, given the authority to spend money, government agencies will continue to spend and spend no matter how dismal the results of their first efforts.
No doubt the District came up with the name “CoCo” hoping people would associate it with chocolate. But I can’t help thinking of coconuts falling onto people’s heads. The people who will be harmed by these coconuts will be the taxpayers who have to pay for them while the only people who will truly benefit will be the companies and contractors who would manufacture the trains, build the stations, and improve the tracks for passenger service.
Colorado taxpayers should say “nuts to that!”
Randal O’Toole is a land-use economist and director of transportation policy at Independence Institute, a free market think tank in Denver. A version of this article originally appeared in his blog, The Antiplanner.
