CO: Community Editorial Board: Considering a Front Range passenger train

Members of our Community Editorial Board, a group of community residents who are engaged with and passionate about local issues, respond to the following question: Last Month, RTD’s Board of Directors voted to explore building a Front Range passenger rail line connecting Denver and Fort Collins through Boulder County. Your take?

If you browse around the Chautauqua Dining Hall, you will come upon a reproduction of an old broadside from Friday, July 27, 1900. The Boulder Democratic Club sponsored a program of music and oration highlighted by the Honorable Champ Clark, who spoke on “Imperialism.” This must have been quite an event. The Colorado Railroad provided same-day service from Greely, Windsor, Loveland and Fort Collins for a round-trip fare of $1. That was one hundred and twenty-five years ago.

To think about the future of mass transit, one must consider the future. Electric autonomous vehicles will revolutionize transportation. Individual travel and personal freedom will be incorporated into the very infrastructure of Smart Cities. Traffic flow will be guided by a universal GPS system, which will reduce congestion and accidents. Drones will not replace trucking anytime soon. But the day is coming when packages will arrive at your doorstep robotically.

A rail system along the Front Range would, out of necessit,y rely on the infrastructure of the past. Trains need stations, and those stations will need parking lots for commuters. One still has to drive to the train station and then back home. The train is a shuttle built on the designs of the past. Front Range fast rail has been in discussion for decades, but we haven’t moved past feasibility studies, while transportation technology has bolted forward. I’m afraid that using rails to solve anticipated problems is missing the point. As Will Rogers once mused, “Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.” We’ve been sitting on this idea for a while.

Vertical airports are already in place with electric air taxis in urban areas like Singapore, Paris and London. This kind of experimentation will only expand.

RTD has $190 million to explore future FasTracks projects. Voter-approved transit expansion is an urgent concern. How can that money best be spent? Taxpayers in Boulder County have already spent $270 million on FasTracks projects with little to show. We can no longer rely on federal support for statewide initiatives, so we must act with frugality and look past present concerns to future needs.

You might say I’ve watched too many Jetsons cartoons as a child, and you would be right. But flat screen TVs, video watches and self-directed vacuum cleaners are now commonplace.

The future that new technologies are taking us to means that the train has already left the station, and the next scenic way to get to Chautauqua may be in a Hyper-Loop.

Jim Vacca, [email protected]

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the difference between appropriating money and actually getting things done. At the federal level, for example, Congress can allocate funds, but it’s the executive branch that decides how — or if — they’re spent. Under the Trump administration, this became painfully clear as funds for key programs were ignored, delayed or redirected for political reasons, proving that without responsible leadership, appropriation alone is meaningless. Here in Boulder County, we’ve lived our own version of this story: voters taxed themselves for FasTracks back in 2004, but without the leadership to follow through, we ended up with no train and a lot of frustration.

That’s why I’m watching RTD’s new vote to explore Front Range passenger rail with cautious optimism. On paper, the plan to finally link Denver to Boulder and Longmont — as voters approved 20 years ago — makes sense. The climate urgency is real, and with Colorado’s population projected to grow by nearly three million residents by 2050, our roads and air quality will face even greater strain. We need alternatives to traffic-choked highways, and a functioning rail system is a smart, future-oriented investment.

But as much as I want to believe, RTD has a history of overpromising and underdelivering. Boulder voters have taxed themselves for FasTracks, yet two decades later, there’s still no train — only a bus system that, despite improvements, can’t fully escape traffic and falls short of what was promised. It’s hard to keep faith when even the Boulder Junction bus station, closed since 2020, still hasn’t reopened. If RTD can’t reopen a bus station for a neighborhood built around transit, why should we believe it can launch a full rail system by 2029?

We need small wins first. Instead of another study or symbolic committee, how about reopening the Boulder Junction bus station and expanding reliable bus service to prove RTD can execute? Show us a weekend or peak-hour rail pilot using existing tracks before asking taxpayers to buy into the next big promise.

The adage says, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice…” but honestly, I think they’re not giving voters enough credit. Climate and congestion demand bold action, but they also require realistic expectations and accountability. If RTD came forward, explained again what went wrong, presented a realistic new plan with clear leadership, and asked for support again, I might consider giving it another go. Maybe that makes me a fool, but I want the rail to happen — and I’d bet many in Boulder do too. Still, trust needs to be earned, and that starts with clear, honest communication about what “rail by 2029” will truly take, what the public’s role will need to be, and small, tangible victories first.

Hernán Villanueva, [email protected]

The RTD Board of Directors voted to “explore” this? They are exploring this idea twenty years after voters told them to do it, and they spent a quarter of a billion dollars not building anything. The people in charge of this clearly don’t know what they are doing, but voters are responsible for this boondoggle as well. We vote for this stuff, hoping magic will happen. How many times does it take before we learn that we can’t base policy on magic? Supposedly, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Only in such a rich country as the USA and in such a rich state as Colorado can we continually waste money on such nonsense.

Utah went down this same road, but they succeeded. Two years after starting the project, they secured use of the existing rail lines. Six years later, they had rail service, and in four more years, it ran 85 miles from Salt Lake City to Provo. This is longer than the entire Denver to Fort Collins proposed route. We have existing rail. Yet in 20 years, we’ve done nothing but spend money. What’s more, the current website says that the first trains could be running within ten years. So, it will be at least 30 years after approving trains before we get to actually ride on one. Utah did the entire thing in 12 years. Maybe we need to hire some Utahans.

RTD exploring this commuter rail service is more ridiculous than Boulder starting its own electric utility. Neither group had or has the foggiest idea of how to build or run these projects. Yet, we cut them loose to tackle these projects — $270 million to RTD and $20 million to Boulder. We could have done so much more with that money.

Yes, I’m frustrated. I’ve written about this before. Some projects are debatable. They might work. They might be worth a try. But this is just so obviously doomed to failure. We have 25 years of failure as data! Instead of this project, Boulder should build an elevated monorail all across the city and then ban cars (Vision Zero, baby!) from the city limits. That would be so cool. All shopping would be delivered via drones. Kids would ride the monorail to school in special cars with interactive learning centers. We’d power it by the modular nuclear reactor on the site of the Valmont coal plant (climate goals achieved!). And this isn’t any crazier than these other two ideas. The advantage is that the conceptual artist renderings will be lit.

Bill Wright, [email protected]