Transit is in trouble, across the U.S. and in Denver.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, fare box revenues and dedicated taxes have plummeted, while transit agencies have had to shoulder new expenses associated with keeping riders and drivers safe, which in turn is necessitating service cuts.
At the same time, the pandemic has revealed how dependent on transit we all are. Many of the essential workers we rely on to keep our grocery store shelves stocked and support our health care system are low-wage earners who need transit to get to their jobs.
For these reasons, now it’s more important than ever to have a clear vision for what a successful transit system would look like in Denver, during COVID and beyond, to justify the funding needed to keep transit alive, and to use that funding that wisely.
RTD’s “Reimagine” process is providing some insight, with an analysis of four different future scenarios presented to the RTD Board last month. Two key themes emerged from this analysis:
Spreading service over a larger area makes it less useful for almost everyone.
At first glance, the “Geographic Coverage” scenario might look like a winner, with 83% of the district’s population being “served” by transit, compared to 70% today (pre-COVID). But with limited resources, the tradeoff is that service gets worse by just about every other metric: frequency and speed of service, cost per rider to provide the service, and the number of people who actually use the service. On each of these metrics, this scenario performs worse than all the others.
Focusing on equity populations makes the service better for most everyone.
The “Social Equity” scenario prioritizes service for low-income households, communities of color, and people who don’t own cars. Interestingly, this scenario performs similarly to or even better than other scenarios aimed at increasing service quality and overall transit ridership. For example, the percent of the population with access to frequent transit service (every fifteen minutes or better) increases from 19% today to 32% in the “Service Quality” scenario and 35% in the Social Equity scenario. For members of the targeted equity populations, this percentage increases from 28% today to 56% in the Equity scenario – a major increase in service quality for those who depend on transit the most (including those essential workers). The Equity scenario also had the second highest total ridership, following closely behind the Service Quality scenario.