6 OCTOBER 24-30, 2024 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | Light Rail, Hard Job RTD IS STRUGGLING TO GET RIDERS BACK ON BOARD, BUT HISTORY SHOWS THAT’S ALWAYS BEEN A BUMPY RIDE. BY CATIE C HESHIRE Denver’s fi rst light rail line opened just over thirty years ago, on October 7, 1994. It was a big time for the city. After sev- eral 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 traffi c. “The public was so excited about it,” Hud- son recalls. “In those opening days, there were tens of thousands of people who came down to ride the trains for the fi rst 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 fi rst 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 Colo- rado Legislature. The agency serves all of Boulder, Broomfi eld, 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, ac- counting for more than half of Colorado’s population. In RTD’s fi rst four years of existence, most of its work involved planning how it would eventually serve the Front Range region while continuing to pro- vide 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 cre- ate 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 de- clined to increase sales taxes to build a light rail network, but the previ- ous 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 benefi ted 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 “unoffi cial 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 fi rst 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 direc- tor of the Independence Institute, was one of those new boardmembers. He and his colleagues were concerned with the fi scal 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. Caldara and his allies on the RTD board did not succeed in preventing the district from investing more in rail lines, partially because of a shakeup that led to disbarred former state legislator Ben Klein becoming board chair after Brian Propp, who was part of the anti-rail alliance, took a job in Ukraine. As a boardmember, Klein had been out- spoken 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 expan- sion 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 lug- gage 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 fi fteen 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 fi nish it was initially estimated at $4.8 billion, but has since infl ated to over $6.7 billion. Ac- cording 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 suc- cess, 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 main- tenance, the A Line has a high reliability rating. Still, it only takes one missed fl ight be- cause of a delayed train for a person to sour on RTD as a whole, NEWS KEEP UP ON DENVER NEWS AT WESTWORD.COM/NEWS continued on page 8 Although light rail’s been around thirty years, it has yet to extend through RTD’s system. RTD
