Denver's first light rail line opened just over thirty years ago, on October 7, 1994.
It was a big time for the city. After several delays, Denver International Airport was just months from opening and Coors Field was close to complete. The light rail project embodied both the excitement and the discomfort that often come with major changes in this city.
According to Andrew Hudson, the then-25-year-old head of communications for the Regional Transportation District, there were many mishaps between trains and motorists in the four months leading up to the launch, particularly in downtown Denver, where the trains ran opposite of traffic.
“The public was so excited about it,” Hudson recalls. “In those opening days, there were tens of thousands of people who came down to ride the trains for the first time. … I was one of the people who would be on the trains to answer questions, and I spent all of two days just riding back and forth. There was this one section up near Tenth and Mariposa, where, when you looked out, there was this huge junkyard with all these scrapped cars. As we drove by there, I’d say, ‘If you look out the window to your right, that's where we put all the cars that we've hit.’”
So much was made of the dangers that cowcatchers were added to the front of trains in hopes of pushing people and cars out of the path of the seventy-ton cars.
Now, after a summer of work on RTD’s rail system — including downtown, where RTD is beginning to fully rebuild lines for the first time in thirty years — public transit users are craving a solution to RTD’s woes, but it's not as simple as just adding a cowcatcher.
Colorado gets on board with the Regional Transportation District
RTD was established in 1969 by the Colorado Legislature. The agency serves all of Boulder, Broomfield, Denver and Jefferson counties, parts of Adams, Arapahoe and Douglas counties, and a bit of Weld County.
That area comprises 2,342 square miles where over three million people live, accounting for more than half of Colorado's population.
In RTD's first four years of existence, most of its work involved planning how it would eventually serve the Front Range region while continuing to provide bus operations in the Denver area, where it had absorbed municipal and private bus systems including Denver Metro Transit, its predecessor in the Mile High City.
RTD first received major funding in 1973, when voters approved a 0.5 percent sales tax to raise $1.56 million to create a multi-modal transit system that would cover 98 miles. By 1976, people had taken 35 million rides on the RTD system.
In 1980, voters declined to increase sales taxes to build a light rail network, but the previous sales tax remained in force. In 1982, the Free MallRide debuted on the new 16th Street Mall.
By the early 1990s, RTD had regional park-and-rides where people in the surrounding areas could leave their vehicles and catch an express ride into Denver. There were also RTD options to shuttle to Broncos and University of Colorado football games. These services, along with the regular bus transport, made the system relatively popular.
Hudson wanted to be sure that light rail benefited from RTD’s good reputation, so he tried to get the downtown community on board. At the time, John Hickenlooper — who would later become Denver’s mayor, governor of Colorado and, most recently, a United States senator — ran the Wynkoop Brewing Co. and was the “unofficial mayor” of LoDo, according to Hudson.
“I invited him to come ride the light rail train before we opened it to the public,” Hudson says. “He was the first non-RTD employee to ride the light rail.”
Despite Hudson’s efforts, light rail had detractors almost immediately. The RTD board turned over in January 1995, and the new directors were more conservative than the gung-ho-for-rail outgoing board, which had approved a $12 million expense for six additional light rail cars and a new line from Denver to Littleton.
Jon Caldara, today the executive director of the Independence Institute, was one of those new boardmembers. He and his colleagues were concerned with the fiscal considerations behind light rail; at the time, RTD’s budget was around $300 million per year.
Caldara still believes that light rail is a waste of money because, unlike roads, rail lines can only be used by RTD. He says that bus routes like the Flatiron Flyer are where RTD should be spending money, because they use infrastructure that already exists.
“We keep putting more and more of our transportation dollars into something that carries fewer and fewer people,” he says of rail lines, pointing to declining RTD rider numbers in recent years.
When RTD rolled out light rail, the agency offered signage to teach passengers how to use the trains.
RTD
As a boardmember, Klein had been outspoken about his dislike of RTD. According to Hudson, sometimes the two would be in interviews in the same room, and while Hudson was pointing out how people could stay safe and aware of the new rail line, Klein would be talking about how RTD was “the worst thing that’s ever happened for this city.”
But after becoming board chair, Klein, who died in 2022, changed his tune and supported light rail. As Caldara puts it, he “learned how to play both sides.” Rail expansion continued, overseen by Cal Marcella, whom the board hired as a compromise candidate to lead RTD as general manager.
Today, in addition to its bus system, RTD has ten rail lines, four of which (A, B, G and N) are heavier, faster commuter rail lines with larger seats, overhead storage and luggage and bicycle racks.
“If you would have told me thirty years ago that light rail was going to be where it is today, going out to Golden and going out to the Tech Center and to Park Meadows and Aurora and a train to the airport.... Lord, I mean, those were things we talked about that were going to happen in the next sixty to seventy years,” Hudson says. “To [Marcella’s] credit, he got it to happen within the next fifteen to twenty years.”
A large part of Marcella's work involved getting voters to approve the now infamous FasTracks initiative in November 2004, which brought 122 miles of new commuter and light rail, eighteen miles of bus rapid transit, and more parking at rail and bus stations.
Voters approved a 0.4 sales tax to fund those enhancements, but high costs have slowed the project — much to the frustration of voters, especially those who were sold on the prospect of a northwest rail line from Denver to Longmont. As of now, that rail line is only about 50 percent complete and runs just to Westminster. The cost to finish it was initially estimated at $4.8 billion, but has since inflated to over $6.7 billion. According to RTD, work on the line may not resume until at least 2035 unless there's a change in funding.
Currently, RTD’s primary funding is a 1 percent sales and use tax on purchases within the district’s boundaries.
“RTD gets both sales and use tax as one of the best-funded transit agencies in the country, and it is largely a dysfunctional, dishonest organization whose primary goal is empire-building,” Caldara says.
Scorned RTD riders might agree with Caldara, but FasTracks has had some success, including the A Line to the airport from Union Station, which has served over 50 million passengers since opening in 2016. Despite initial hiccups with safety and maintenance, the A Line has a high reliability rating.
Still, it only takes one missed flight because of a delayed train for a person to sour on RTD as a whole, illustrating the challenges the agency faces in working for over three million people.
“I don’t envy it,” says Denver City Councilwoman Shontel Lewis, who served on the RTD board from 2019 to 2022 before being elected to council. “How do you bring folks from the suburbs into the city? How do you bring folks out of the city into the suburbs? How do you operate train services? How do you operate regular bus service? How do you operate a BRT? How do you operate the accessible transit that they have? It's a lot for one transit agency to carry.”
RTD serves forty municipalities with 112 fixed bus and rail routes. Of those routes, 85 are local and twelve are regional. The district owns and operates 607 buses in-house and owns another 421 operated by private carriers. It has 201 light rail vehicles and 66 commuter rail vehicles.
“Because they're spread so thin, I think very few people are happy about what they're receiving, understandably,” Lewis says.
The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated RTD’s problems, with a 46 percent decrease in RTD ridership from 2019 to 2022. In 2023, RTD had more than 65 million annual boardings, but that is still significantly lower than pre-pandemic numbers of over 100 million, according to RTD.
With funding that depends on ridership, such sharp declines can create a dangerous cycle. During the pandemic, the state legislature repealed RTD’s longtime requirement to recover 30 percent of its expenses through fares. According to a Common Sense Institute Report on RTD, fares accounted for only 4.4 percent of RTD’s operating costs this past January.
Richard Bamber, co-founder of Greater Denver Transit, an advocacy group focused on providing technical expertise to urban public transit discussions around the city, believes that a 30 percent limit is too high, but worries that RTD no longer needs to generate revenue through ridership.
“They do need to be seen to be maximizing their own revenue and doing everything they can to bring dollars in,” Bamber says. And unlike taxes and grants, fare money has no strings attached; those dollars can go wherever RTD chooses.
Even with ridership revenue struggles, RTD’s budget for 2024 is projected to reach over $1 billion for the first time, according to the Common Sense Institute.
RTD construction and delays hurt reputation
While taking the first steps to redo the downtown rail lines, the agency completely shut down the L Line from the end of May through September and rerouted the D and H lines to Union Station instead of their usual routes through the Central Business District.RTD also restored coping panels (retaining wall caps) on its Southeast Corridor, which comprises twenty miles of track along Interstate 25 from Lone Tree to Denver on portions of the E, H and R lines. At the same time, RTD dealt with unexpected safety issues during work on the lines that the district had to repair, creating slow zones. As recently as October 21, there were slow zones on the E, H, R and D lines because of safety maintenance, according to the RTD speed restrictions dashboard.
Transit advocates like Bamber say RTD’s lack of public outreach regarding the delays has hurt the agency. Greater Denver Transit has repeatedly asked RTD for temporary schedules that reflect slow zones rather than promising that trains will run at certain times, only for people to be delayed and let down.
“We really wish that RTD would actually say, 'Look, something has gone wrong here for us to be imposing mass amounts of slow zones,'” Bamber says. “Customer experience: Public transit agencies just do not focus on it, and that's the problem we have.”
Riders reported delays and trains not arriving when expected just two days after RTD’s latest service changes were implemented on September 29. Bamber says RTD needs to put forth a plan for how it will manage assets as it ages, rather than claiming to be constantly in “maintenance mode.”
“I appreciate if RTD believes they were not giving enough to maintenance,” Bamber says. “But to say that because we didn't do enough related to maintenance, we're going to justify gutting the capital projects and programs part of [our] organization does not seem right, given that I think we're all universally agreed that we still need to build way more transit than we have to build the system we need.”
Operating rail lines during expansions requires a lot more money and resources than the average citizen recognizes, according to Lewis, who says that one of her biggest realizations while on the board was just how much maintenance RTD had put off because of costs. Fixing leaky roofs, replacing obsolete items in the mechanic shop and other repairs added up to around $20 million when she was on the board, Lewis says.
But she concedes that it’s hard for people to keep an open mind about RTD while they’re struggling with service problems.
The A Line is one of the more problem-free lines. It's operated by contractor Denver Transit Partners; 50 percent of RTD’s fixed-route system must be allocated to private companies through a competitive contracting process.
Because the commuter rail system is largely farmed out, it’s often repaired more quickly than the rest of the rail system, Bamber suggests: “If they don't run trains, they don't get paid — it's as simple as that."
A Line maintenance, for example, is often done at night, and as soon as it's completed, the trains are running again. But when construction on the RTD-operated downtown rail line was done early in September, RTD waited three weeks to resume light rail services.
Caldara believes that if more of RTD’s services were contracted out, the entire system would function better.
“If they wanted to finish out FasTracks, all they would have to do is contract out the rest of their fixed services, bus services, and use that savings to build the rest of the system,” he argues, noting that during his time on the board, contracting was less expensive for RTD than operating routes in-house.
RTD budget challenges looming
RTD could face bigger budget problems soon if voters don’t approve Ballot Issue 7A, which would make RTD’s exemption from the Taxpayer's Bill of Rights permanent.Because of TABOR, government organizations like RTD must refund unexpected tax revenue to taxpayers each year. For RTD, that would now require refunds of 7 to 10 percent of its over $600 million in tax revenue. But RTD has been exempt since 1995, when voters originally agreed to release the agency from TABOR restrictions through 2005. In 1999, voters extended that time frame until RTD paid bond debt from the construction of certain light rail lines, and those lines will be paid in full by November.
Even those critical of RTD want the measure to pass.
“The transit agency, the transit system, we need to tackle our congestion, our climate, our livability, our equity goals. It’s going to need funding,” Bamber says. “All the current sort of gripes and bones we've been going through have come about in the last seven, eight, nine, ten years. This is a 25-year decision.”
Bamber believes that the next 25 years could see even more expansion from RTD, but only if the agency puts customers first. Historically, transit systems in the United States have provided bus service with low-income users as the target audience and trains for suburban dwellers to get to the city for work. But to make transit systems more relevant, the people in charge need to consider how to convert daily car drivers, he says.
And to do that, public transit needs to cater to people’s sense of comfort, and not just provide routes and hope people use them.
“In the same way that Spirit’s planes go just as fast as United's, they go to the same places, they're actually just as safe, but you'd still rather fly United, wouldn't you?” Bamber says. “It’s because of customer service.”
Metro areas like Denver also have rideshare options that cater to usability through the pick-up and drop-off process. If RTD were to embrace its strategic initiative of creating a welcoming transit environment beyond cleanliness and crime considerations, that would convince people to ride, Bamber argues.
He cites a time he was on a bus that got sideswiped. Although the driver knew the protocol regarding contacting security and letting management know what happened, no one told the customers what to do: Should they change buses? Would this one be back on the road quickly? How could they transfer their fares if needed?
“If you start to look at a lot of people's complaints with RTD...we all have the same problem,” Bamber says. “The service is not good.”
Simple items like live schedule screens that actually work at more bus and train stops would help. Union Station has no large departure boards in its main space telling people where they can go and when; instead, they have to consult their personal devices or look around until they find someone who will tell them that the bus terminal and tracks are out back.
“There's a lack of information,” Bamber says. “I've always called downtown Denver the secret transit system...but it shouldn't be a secret.”
Eight of fifteen RTD board seats are up for election this year, with five races considered competitive. Seven candidates, led by District A nominee Chris Nicholson, have signed a pledge to fix RTD through a common-sense plan that centers on riders.
The pledge involves three sections: quality end-to-end, safety you can feel, and a schedule RTD can deliver. Ideas like adding QR code access to real-time departure information, bus route availability, popular destinations and safety tools are part of the quality end-to-end mission, which focuses on measuring customer experience and then improving that experience.
As for safety, the pledge states that the board will expect RTD's executive leaders to ride RTD more often and hire safety ambassadors for stations and known problem routes. For scheduling, the pledge promises to discuss system reliability data at every board meeting, offer real-time GPS data about where trains and buses are, and be more transparent when things aren't working.
"Every transit system has bad days and every transit system has late service some of the time," the pledge acknowledges. "But routine, serious failures and the inability to give riders accurate information has created a cavernous trust gap. The solution is better communication, internally and externally, and improvements in technology to ensure that the expectations RTD sets for customers always match reality."
On the other hand, Kathleen Chandler, who's running for the RTD seat in Aurora, harks back to the fiscally conservative nature of Caldara's time on the board.
The board's main job is to hire a general manager for RTD, which this board may have to do soon; current RTD general manager Debra Johnson's contract expires next year.
During Lewis’s time on the board, she implemented more robust public comment and livestreaming, both of which serve constituents and help make RTD’s inner workings more transparent. The RTD board used to only have public comment opportunities once a month; now there is a public comment segment at every committee meeting.
As Lewis can attest, though, change at RTD isn't always easy. After hearing "no" one too many times, she streamed the meetings on her Facebook account.
“RTD kept saying, ‘We can't do this. We can't do this,’ so I did it,” Lewis recalls. “Shortly after, the agency somehow figured out how to livestream all of our meetings on YouTube.”
Bamber says that RTD has to stop being the agency of "no.” When people ask for things RTD can’t deliver yet, he would like to see the district put together a road map for getting there rather than just saying things aren’t possible.
“When you say no, nobody does any working together,” he says.
Now that Lewis is approaching RTD from a different side of government, she hopes to help other members of Denver City Council work more closely with the district.
“What it has allowed me to do is really be the expert on our council body — to say, no, there are true limitations,” Lewis says. “Let me help you to understand where RTD is failing and where there's opportunity for them to grow. … As a council, we have committed to figuring out how do we partner with RTD instead of piling on to what RTD is already dealing with.”
Finally, Lewis believes RTD needs to work harder at telling its story. She developed so much love for RTD’s operators by learning what they deal with, she says, and she wants the agency to apply that to the rest of its system.
Hudson, who once had the job of telling RTD’s story, agrees.
“I wish RTD would get its mojo back,” Hudson says, remembering the old Bus Rodeo skills challenges and operator spotlights he would share with the media when he was a spokesperson. “I know everything's not in their control, but gosh, it just seems like their reputation is going to take generations to repair. … I'm certainly not the person out there to say what they need to do, but I know that there are a lot of opportunities for them to improve their reputation.”
