“Studying” a Rail Line to Longmont
26th October 2023
Denver’s Regional Transit District (RTD) has announced that it is going to study the “commuter’s dream” of running a commuter rail line from downtown Denver to Longmont, Colorado. This line was originally supposed to be a part of the FasTracks plan approved by voters in 2004, but cost overruns combined with new ridership projections killed it.
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RTD will never admit it, but the rail lines it did build were effectively a failure. In 2004, RTD promised voters that FasTracks would greatly relieve congestion by taking hundreds of thousands of cars off the road. The 2000 census found that 4.79 percent of Denver-area workers took transit to work and approximately 1.0 million vehicles were used by commuters every day. By 2019, after all but the Longmont line had been built, transit carried 4.78 percent of Denver-area workers to work and the number of vehicles used by commuters increased to almost 1.2 million.