6 FEBRUARY 20-26, 2025 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | The Bus Stops Here TWO RTD DIRECTORS JOIN US FOR A RIDE ON THE 15, DENVER’S MOST LEGENDARY ROUTE. BY JASON HELLER Kathleen Chandler and Chris Nicholson don’t have a lot common. Both RTD directors — she of District F, he of District A — were sworn in on January 6, part of a freshman class of seven elected in November. Chandler is a conservative, a Colorado native and a suburbanite who lives in southeast Aurora. Nicholson is a liberal, a California native and an urbanite who lives in the middle of downtown. She comes from the nonprofi t world. He comes from the tech sector. She’s quick. He’s chill. But this ostensibly odd couple is united by one big thing: the majority of East Colfax Avenue between Broadway in Denver and Tower Road in Aurora, which runs through their districts. They effectively share cus- tody of Denver’s most infamous bus line, the 15. And since taking offi ce, they’ve been appointed to RTD’s Operations Safety and Security Committee, setting aside their dif- ferences in an attempt to make their newly adopted baby as healthy as it can be. “We’re also friends,” says Nicholson. “Yes, we are,” Chandler says, “even though he voted against me.” “I didn’t actually vote against her,” he counters with a smile. “But I did endorse her opponent.” Chandler and Nicholson have accepted Westword’s offer to ride down East Colfax on the 15 one recent Saturday while chat- ting about the past, present and future of this notorious line. They meet us at Union Station at 9 a.m., coffee in hand and ready to roll. Well, mostly ready. She is a peppy, up-and-at-’em early bird; Nicholson had to groggily drag himself out of bed. We head to the escalator that takes us belowground to Gate B8, the arrival and departure spot for the 15. But we’ve barely stepped off before Nicholson is performing transit-focused public service. “Do you know where Winehouse Street is?” asks a passerby, bundled in numerous coats and hauling a huge pack. “Do you mean Wynkoop Street?” re- sponds Nicholson. The passerby — perhaps a let-down Amy Winehouse fan — nods. Nicholson gives him directions, and he ambles off. “It’s better to tell people to go through Union Station, not try to go around it,” Nicholson says. “The straightforward way is easier.” Coincidentally, we’re about to board one of the most straightforward buses in Denver. The twelve miles of East Colfax that com- prise the 15 bend only slightly as they stretch toward the line’s Aurora terminus. Running between 14th Avenue to the south and 16th Avenue to the north — spoiler alert: hence, the 15 — the regular line and its speedier sister, the 15L, carry over 20,000 passengers a day, making this Denver’s most-ridden route. As a result, it’s bound to have the most, um, character. And that unsavory perception seems to cling to the 15 no matter who’s in charge. “There’s this cycle, right? You don’t ride the bus because it’s unsafe. Well, it’s unsafe because you don’t ride it,” Chandler says as we pay our fares and settle into our seats. (Neither she nor Nicholson have offered us complimentary passes for this morning’s ride: This isn’t the guest list at a rock concert, and you don’t get in free just because you know the headliners.) Aside from us and one other passenger, the bus is empty. It’s Saturday morning, after all. But that goes to Chandler’s point. “When you get on a bus, and you’re the only person on it, it can get a little creepy when someone else gets on it, whether they’re going to harm you or not,” she says. “There’s safety in numbers. So if there was, like, twenty people on the bus, you wouldn’t feel as weird. It’s just this weird dynamic. We need to increase the ridership, really, in order to increase the ridership.” Rehabilitating the 15’s reputation for fi lth, menace and rollercoaster-like ricketiness, however, will take more than pointing out this catch-22. The bus lurches forward, and suddenly we’re above ground. Sunlight streams in. And as the driver brings us out of downtown and past the Capitol, headed east, passengers start to fi ll those seats. Colfax and Grant “Unfortunately, I think what’s happened is that RTD has grown too big for its britches,” Chandler says, “and so we’re not doing the core services well. In my mind, we need to pull back and deliver the core services to the people who need it the most. Because the core services aren’t servicing anyone well right now.” Those core services should seem obvious — the Colorado General Assembly formed RTD in 1969 for exactly that purpose — but they’re under constant revision and redefi ni- tion. RTD’s System Optimization Plan from 2022 refers to core services as the “backbone” of what it does, and that roughly equates to getting people from point A to point B as quickly, effi ciently and safely as possible But that’s easier said than done, especially when you’re an incoming RTD director who’s jumping onto a swiftly moving vehicle, as it were...and when almost every RTD rider has their own set of needs, including para- transit passengers with disabilities. “When you have transit-dependent and para-transit people who are not being ser- viced well, and you’re also trying to service somebody who lives way out in Douglas County or way out in Jefferson County, they need to be focused on fi rst,” Chandler says. “That’s what we should do as a compassionate society, but that’s what we should do as tax- payers too, right? We’re paying for a service. It’s the old adage: Do one thing, and do it well.” Chandler identifi es that core business as transit. It’s another strategy as circular as an RTD route: Get back to the core by getting back to the core. But she digs into specifi cs when it comes to security, one of the major issues she ran on in 2024, when she was elected by voters in District F, a sprawl that comprises more or less all of Aurora — from Anschutz Medical Campus on the northwest to the edge of Elbert County on the southeast. Until 1980, RTD directors were appointed; since then, they’ve been elected by residents of their districts for four-year terms, with a maximum of two terms. It’s possible that both Chandler and Nicholson will hold their seats until 2033; at that point, RTD will exist in a completely different Denver. “My platform was focused on security,” she says. “Security is very important to me. Security has a lot of different components, so that means not only making sure that you’re safe on the platform or at the bus stop, but it also means fare collection. Enforcing fare collection means you’re less likely to get people who are using RTD for a purpose other than transit.” Depending on how you view it, Chandler’s euphemism — “people who use RTD for a purpose other than transit” — could apply to two types of passengers: those experiencing homelessness and those wanting to commit crimes. The two don’t directly correlate, of course. Homelessness and crime are never going to disappear from RTD, especially the historically gritty 15, but Chandler feels that RTD’s new Impact Team program, which was launched in 2024 as a way of assisting passen- gers via “outreach ambassadors” stationed at major stops, can go a long way toward increas- ing security and comfort while riding. She’s also a proponent of increasing the number of fare collection inspectors on light rail. Nicholson offers another type of RTD employee that may be able to help shore up service and effi ciency. “We’ve talked about having having secret shoppers on rides, people that are kind of looking and seeing and reporting,” he says. “Not that we’re spy- ing, but we have a code of conduct in place.” Chandler and Nicholson agree that the benefi ts of raising RTD’s fare-box recovery system-wide will pay dividends beyond monetary ones — not that the monetary aspect can be ignored. Fare-box recovery is the ratio between what is spent on operat- ing costs and what is collected in passenger fares, and RTD’s is terrible. It currently sits at 5 percent, which means for every dollar RTD uses toward services, only fi ve cents comes from what passengers pay in fares (including what some employers spend on EcoPasses for their workers). Before COVID, it was 20 percent, just below the national average that Nicholson estimates to be about 30 percent. But RTD’s fare-box recovery plummeted during COVID and has yet to bounce back. The rest of RTD’s funding comes from tax- payers, and Chandler and Nicholson both consider themselves fiscally conservative when it comes to that money. “RTD has a 2,500-square-mile service area overall,” Nicholson says. His own Dis- trict A doesn’t look that large, geographically, but it’s the densest, NEWS continued on page 8 KEEP UP ON DENVER NEWS AT WESTWORD.COM/NEWS The 15 is Denver’s most legendary bus route. KATRINA LEIBEE
