There’s little doubt that metro Aurora is in for more rough riding with the Regional Transportation District.
The region has long had a love-hate relationship with RTD. Mostly, residents, riders and local elected officials love to hate on the beleaguered bus and light-rail government. And often rightly so.
For years, the RTD gave the metro area nothing but marginal bus service. It has long suffered from having to cover too large an area with far too few resources.
This is the West, where land once was cheap and plentiful, and growth came after the advent of the automobile. Metro Denver was built around the need for everyone to have a car, or stay home. The RTD must serve more than 3 million people across 2,342 square miles, encompassing eight, enormous counties.
The creation of RTD in 1969 did little to change the need to have a car. It doesn’t mean that no one rides RTD buses and light-rail trains. The entire system logged just over 95 million boardings in 2019. But you only have to look at the metro area’s overcrowded highways and too empty buses and light-rail trains to understand the problem.
The RTD system is either too expensive or too inconvenient to lure enough people from their cars to make all of this work.
Officials inside and out of the RTD system have repeatedly pointed out that the “last mile” of an RTD excursion is what keeps so many off The Ride. It’s too time-consuming or difficult to get to a place to catch the bus or train. Then it’s the same problem to step off the bus or light-rail and get to a final destination. The Aurora area is notoriously unwalkable. Long distances often require multiple buses and long waits in between.
Just this year, RTD changed its fee schedule to try and lure the poorest metro residents on for a ride. A round-trip ticket from Aurora to Denver is $10.50 without a discount. It’s $5.25 for a round-trip bus ticket from the Town Center of Aurora mall to nearby Gateway High School, without a discount. It’s unclear how that might have changed the picture, given the pandemic, but without discounts, anyone wealthier than poor is compelled to keep driving.
But RTD is vastly underfunded in trying to accomplish their current mission. Not only does the system need more, and more frequent, services to lure reluctant riders, RTD needs to finish the system to include critical promises unkept.
Years later than promised, RTD just recently, finally opened light-rail service to some northern suburbs. But not to Boulder. That critical line, which could remove hundreds of thousands of car trips from metro highways, isn’t even scheduled for completion, even though taxpayers were promised a Boulder line during a tax-hike election that created “FasTracks” in 2004.
Making a bad situation worse, RTD is suffering a new financial crisis because of the pandemic. Some district officials are suggesting service cuts, including the already reduce-service R-Line light rail system serving Aurora, be further diminished.
RTD desperately needs help. Hopefully, they’ll get it from a new CEO. They’ve offered the job to Debra Johnson, who currently helps run the Long Beach, California transit system. She previously worked for similar systems in Washington D.C., San Francisco and Los Angeles. Such a wealth of experience counts, but this metro area is unlike any other.
In addition, voters will elect new members to the 18-member RTD government this fall. It’s time to bring new, bold ideas on board. What RTD has tried for more than 50 years isn’t working, and it’s costing riders and taxpayers about $740 million a year.
It could be that more money, through an increased gas or sales tax, is needed to improve service and reduce fares. Or it could be that RTD must vastly reduce service to outlying and low-density areas to improve service from more park-and-ride sites. Or both.
The RTD needs a vision that will make using the bus and train practical and affordable, which it is neither right now for the majority of metro residents.