Blasting With Boyles
OPINION
In our state of Colorado there once was an event that became one of the earliest Western movies, The Great Train Robbery. Where manly men with bandanas over their faces, six-guns blazing, stuck up the train. Train robbing became the crime of the day for people like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Who didn’t love a train robbery, with legendary train robbers like Jesse and Frank James?
Now come Governor Polis and RTD and we end up with the train dubbed Coco. Just to give you an idea of what people are being paid to do in Colorado, one of the names they came up with was Front Range Express Destinations. FRED. Ranger. A train built for the Colorado landscape and lifestyle. Range Link connecting people to jobs, schools, and destinations without the hassle of driving.
I’ve knocked around RTD for almost as many years as I’ve been in radio. I found out the only people that really do like the RTD are borderline socialists and bond daddies. For those of you who don’t know what a bond daddy is, they came to Colorado under the Romer and Peña administrations and it works like this — they’ve never seen a public works project that they didn’t love.
They are called public private partnerships. What happens is the public pays and the private part makes enormous amounts of money. The public naming of the new train was open to all of us and I’m sure you got your ballot to choose the name of an inner-city train that would connect front range communities beginning in 2029. How many times have you noticed light rail going past you totally empty. Or an RTD bus doing about the same. So, do we need another one of these?
Of course not. But watch again how the money is made. And with Polis telling folks how excited people are about the RTD finally delivering a modern passenger train along the front range. CoCo.
Watch this. I have no idea but, given past performance being a predicter of future performance, I can make a guess. Look at what you see and what’s being paid for by you that nobody uses. Criticism of RTD is that it’s unreliable, it has frequent delays; some people have actually experienced multiple cancellations in the same day. There are safety and cleanliness issues. People complain about open drug use and public urination and lack of any transit police patrolling trains or the stations.
There are slow zones: RTD is using speed restrictions on light rail lines like the R line and the E line. Maintenance needs and extended times that people ride, and they find they can get back home in the evening quicker in their car than they can riding the existing products.
Because of the watch dog media on the Front Range, CoCO got RTD’s blessing.
We already have a couple of projects that have not been completed. Does the name FasTracks mean anything to you?
Remember the rail link between Boulder and Denver? It’s been collecting tax revenue since 2004. It ain’t there.
RTD is doing projects such as downtown rail reconstruction. More long-term reliability, and you can get up-to-date information, you can check RTD services alerts, and, of course, those are questions that nobody asks.
I’ve watched this stuff for a long time, and I want to thank Jon Caldara from the Independence Institute, a former board member and critic of RTD.
The state of Colorado subsidizes a bus service that ran the Front Range corridor. Carried 171,000 passengers in 2019. CoCo projects they will attract 200,000 passengers per year and the cost is between $1.7 billion and $2.8 billion. Can you believe that it would be worth that much money to attract 29,000 more people, you’re going to pay between $1.7 billion and $2.98 billion.
I’ve been told this is minor league spending and minor league development and if I were to look at the real costs, overruns, and expenditures of projects that have been pushed on us by RTD, we would welcome CoCo.
Stick ’em up!
— Peter Boyles
