AURORA | Aurora officials are preparing to campaign against a slew of proposed changes to Regional Transportation District rail service next year, including a plan to completely ax the city’s R Line and replace it with an extension of the H Line that currently runs from East Florida Avenue to Downtown Denver.
Aurora City Councilperson Angela Lawson on Monday rang the alarm on RTD’s proposed rejiggering, which could take effect as early as January of next year.
“This is going to have a significant impact on our community’s residents and employers,” Lawson told The Sentinel Tuesday. “We’ve made significant developments around RTD, and if they take away the R line in any capacity it’s going to really impact the city.”
Lawson said she learned of the plan at a recent meeting of the Reimagine RTD Advisory Committee, which is part of the organization’s two-year-long look in the mirror. Started last year, the project is intended to shape RTD’s service in the coming decades.
On July 15, RTD officials presented a draft of the group’s “2021 COVID constrained service plan,” which suggests combining several lines in the southern portion of the metro area, including the C and D Lines in Littleton, the E and F lines in Lone Tree and the R and H lines in Aurora. If approved, more than 3,000 current R Line riders would be required to make new transfers, the bulk of which would occur at the Southmoor station along Interstate 225.
“They want to have people throughout Aurora transfer between the H, E and F, and do all these transfers to get people where they’re going,” Lawson said. “Number one, it’s going to be confusing, and number two, we’re going to lose ridership.”
Huiliang Liu, principal transportation planner with the city’s planning department, painted RTD’s description of “line consolidation” as a red herring, saying that nixing the R Line — which currently runs from its northern terminus near Interstate 70 and Peoria Street to Lone Tree — would severely hamper residents’ access to the southeastern corner of the metroplex.
“They call it consolidation, but it’s not a consolidation because it would go to a completely different destination,” Liu said. “The R Line goes to the southeast corridor, now it would go to Downtown Denver. Those are totally different directions.”
RTD bills the proposed H line extension as “a 1-seat ride from Aurora to Denver,” according to documents outlining the possible changes.
Since it first began operating in February 2017, low ridership has plagued the city’s R Line and resulted in a lower frequency of trains.
Aurora’s primary rail line is currently the only area in RTD’s rail network where trains come every 30 minutes instead of every 15 minutes, according to Liu. Under the new plan, trains could eventually ratchet up to running every 10 minutes by 2023, according to RTD documents.
But the R Line was showing promise before the coronavirus pandemic decimated RTD’s ridership figures and revenues, according to Board Director Bob Broom, who represents RTD’s portion of Aurora just east of I-225.
Broom said ridership was up about 13% on the R Line in the first two months of 2020 when compared to January and February of last year. The line was averaging 6,569 daily riders every weekday in the second half of last year, according to RTD statistics.
Broom said that because the line is still among the newest in the RTD network, it needs more time for riders to become regulars and for residents to move to still forthcoming housing developments along the city’s ribbon of light rail. He cautioned his fellow board members from making drastic service cuts.
“Given all the uncertainty we’ve got with this virus thing, we should not be making major changes to our system until we have a bettor feel going forward about what our financial situation really is,” Broom said. “If we turn around and cut the R Line to balance the budget and didn’t need to do it, that would be stupid in my mind.”
The agency is expecting a budgetary shortfall of more than $250 million next year, Colorado Public Radio reported last month.
Claudia Folska, who represents Aurora’s service area west of I-225, said she didn’t have enough information to comment on any proposed R Line changes, but underscored that the city’s light rail infrastructure will remain intact.
“The R Line isn’t going away,” she said. “It’s hard. It’s fixed. No one’s ripping it out.”
Still, Liu with the city’s planning department said officials must actively lobby the RTD board in an effort to dissuade them from shuttering Aurora’s nascent rail line.
“We need to work hard to fight with RTD on this to preserve the needed rail and transit service for our residents, employees, customers and especially our equity population,” he said.
Staffers with the city’s planning department will be briefing the city council’s transportation committee at a regular meeting on Thursday to discuss what further action can be taken.
The RTD board of directors is tentatively slated to vote on the the proposed service changes in late October.