The Front Range Passenger Rail District wants Coloradans to spend $4.7 billion, plus around $100 million per year in operating costs, to run a few passenger trains a day between Fort Collins and Pueblo. A sales tax hike to help fund the scheme will be decided by voters across the Front Range in November with Ballot Issue 7A.
Here are ten reasons why the Colorado Connector or “CoCo” will do more harm than good for Colorado.
- CoCo won’t relieve congestion: Parts of Interstate 25 carry more than 200,000 vehicles per day. A single train will carry only about 500 people and initially only one train will run during morning and afternoon rush hours. Even at full build out, which won’t be for many years, only three or four trains will run during morning and afternoon rush hours. Taking a few hundred cars off I-25 will not meaningfully reduce congestion.
- In fact, CoCo will make congestion worse: CoCo trains will stop traffic at nearly 100 grade crossings between Fort Collins and Denver and well over 100 between Denver and Pueblo. The delays at these grade crossings will greatly outweigh any savings from the few automobiles CoCo will take off I-25 or other north-south highways.
- CoCo won’t go where you want to go: CoCo trains would be scheduled to stop at just twelve stations along its route. Only a small percentage of Front Range residents live near one of these stations, and only rarely will those people want to go somewhere that is near another station. Buses, shared rides, taxis, and other highway vehicles can go on some 4,000 miles of arterials and collectors and 12,000 miles of local roads and streets in Front Range communities. The rail line from Fort Collins to Pueblo is less than 190 miles long. That’s why CoCo will carry less than one-half of one percent of passenger travel in the region.
- CoCo will be slow: Driving from Fort Collins to Denver takes about 65 minutes during non-peak periods and 90 minutes during rush hour. CoCo will take 105 minutes. Pueblo to Denver is two hours by car and two-and-a-half hours during rush hour but will be at least two-and-three-quarter hours by CoCo.
- CoCo will be less frequent than Bustang: For less than $20 million a year, Colorado currently operates 12 Bustang buses a day from Denver to Fort Collins and 12 more to Colorado Springs. CoCo will run, at most, ten times a day to Fort Collins and eight times a day to Pueblo and will cost taxpayers nearly $300 million a year. The state is asking voters to spend billions of dollars to trade frequent buses for slower, less frequent trains.
- CoCo will harm low-income families: The regressive CoCo sales tax will make low-income people pay for train rides taken by relatively wealthy people. Why should low-income people pay higher taxes so that snobs who won’t ride a bus can take a train that costs taxpayers more than ten times as much?
- CoCo will increase greenhouse gas emissions: Utah’s FrontRunner produces more greenhouse gases for every passenger-mile it carries than the average car. New Mexico’s Rail Runner produces more greenhouse gases per passenger-mile than the average SUV. CoCo’s Diesel-powered trains are not likely to do better.
- CoCo will kill: CoCo will be slower than driving but faster than freight trains. Remember those 200-plus grade crossings between Fort Collins and Pueblo? When passenger trains were added to a Florida route that previously only had slow freight trains, the passenger trains ended up killing an average of one person every 13 days, making it the most dangerous rail line in America.
- CoCo is obsolete: Long before CoCo starts between Fort Collins and Denver, Waymo has already begun operating driverless taxis in Denver that will cost less and take people door-to-door. Before CoCo could operate its first scheduled train to Pueblo, such driverless taxis are likely to be taking people anywhere along the Front Range.
- $4.7 billion is a lot of money: For the cost of CoCo, the state could build two new lanes on I-25 from Ft. Collins to Pueblo, double the number of buses operated by Colorado transit agencies, buy every elementary and high school student in Front Range schools a new laptop computer, and replace those laptops every other year. Why should all that money be blown on a train that few people will ride?
We’ve been here before
In 2004, RTD promised that its FasTracks plan (which coincidentally was also supposed to cost $4.7 billion) would relieve congestion by taking hundreds of thousands of cars off the road. Instead, after suffering 80 percent cost overruns, transit carried only about 8,000 more weekday riders in 2019 than when FasTracks construction began. Meanwhile, the number of hours the average commuter sat in congested traffic grew by more than 50 percent.
Since COVID, RTD ridership has declined nearly 40 percent. COVID changed people’s travel habits but it is much harder to alter rail lines than bus routes in response to such changes. While RTD buses carried 63 percent as many riders in 2025 as in 2019, RTD light rail carried only 43 percent.
Like RTD, the state is claiming CoCo will relieve congestion, but it won’t do any better at that than FasTracks. What it will almost certainly do is have large cost overruns and attract few riders to trains that are slower than driving and don’t go where they need to go. Yet CoCo’s sales tax will go on forever.
CoCo advocates claim voters have a choice between a train and building more freeways. In fact, the train will not significantly reduce driving. CoCo is giving voters a choice between blowing billions of dollars on a train few people will ride and keeping that money in their pockets to do with what they want.
If CoCo is so bad, then why does anyone support it? BNSF will benefit from major improvements to its infrastructure and earn income from trains that will replace its declining coal traffic.
Other contractors will get work building stations, installing new signaling systems, and providing train cars and locomotives. Much of the $4.7 billion you would pay in taxes would find its way into the pockets of people whose incomes are probably much higher than yours. Naturally, they favor CoCo.
The state plans to start service between Fort Collins and Denver no matter what the outcome of the election. Voters should let that service prove whether there is any ridership demand before agreeing to raise taxes by nearly $300 million per year based on vague promises and speculation.
Face it: CoCo is cuckoo. Coloradans should not pay higher taxes on school supplies, clothing, hardware, restaurants, and everyday necessities just so the state can spend a ridiculous amount of money on trains Colorado doesn’t need.
Randal O’Toole is the director of the Independence Institute’s Transportation Policy Center and author of Romance of the Rails: Why the Passenger Trains We Love Are Not the Transportation We Need.
