Colorado Connector Rail Comes With a Taxpayer Catch

BizWest reports that the Loveland and Louisville city councils are set to vote on resolutions supporting their cities’ roles in Front Range Passenger Rail service between Fort Collins and Denver. The project has now been branded the Colorado Connector, or “CoCo,” for those who can say that without tasting bile. If the cities opt into the rail district’s Local Return program by June 30, Loveland could receive nearly $69 million over 25 years and Louisville could receive up to $55 million, assuming voters approve a future regional funding measure.

The first leg of the project is intended to connect Denver Union Station to Fort Collins by Jan. 1, 2029, with three daily round trips and stops along the Boulder Valley corridor. BizWest reports that the starter service would rely on a pooled funding approach involving RTD FasTracks revenue, rental car fee revenue, oil and gas fee revenue, and other operating revenues.

So here we go. City councils in Loveland and Louisville get to weigh in on what could become the biggest and most expensive flop in Colorado transportation history, a taxpayer-fed fantasy on steel wheels while the highways Coloradans actually use continue to look like they were maintained by raccoons with a bond measure.

The Bullet Point Brief

• Loveland and Louisville are being asked to sign onto the Local Return program, which sounds less like transportation planning and more like a timeshare pitch with a station platform.
• The rail district says the money would help local governments design, build, operate, and maintain station-area improvements. Translation: the train is not even here yet, and the bill already has little bills.
• The broader project is now called the Colorado Connector, or “CoCo.” Somewhere, a consultant got paid real money to make a serious infrastructure project sound like a boutique candle.
• Louisville staff called the resolution a “low-commitment, high-optionality policy step,” which is government-speak for “just put one toe in the bear trap and we’ll discuss the rest later.”
• The article notes the starter service would include three daily round trips between Denver and Fort Collins. Three. In a corridor where people need practical transportation, not a civic art project with a schedule.

My Bottom Line

I did some back-of-the-napkin math during the latest Front Range Passenger Rail numbers presentation at the North Front Range Metropolitan Planning Organization. In the beginning, Colorado taxpayers could be subsidizing this fantasy on steel wheels to the tune of about $56 per passenger from Fort Collins to Union Station. That is $56 per passenger. Before anyone buys a coffee, pays for parking, calls an Uber, or realizes they could have driven there faster.

And that is the real problem. No one who actually wants to get somewhere in a practical amount of time is going to plan their life around this thing. A car traveling from Pueblo to Denver would beat the train in roughly half the time, even after accounting for the usual I-25 misery parade. CoCo is not a transportation solution. It is a moving subsidy with windows.

Meanwhile, Colorado’s real transportation grid, the highways that actually move people and goods from Point A to Point B, is a national embarrassment. The Reason Foundation’s annual rankings have dinged Colorado again and again, including miserable marks for overall highway condition and especially rural roads. Last year, Colorado was buried near the bottom for interstate pavement conditions and congestion, while drivers spent hour after hour stuck in traffic. That is not a transportation system. That is a rolling apology.

The Common Sense Institute has already pointed out the obvious: transportation fees are not going to roads. Since 2017, Colorado has created or increased transportation-related fees, then steered too much of that money toward environmental mitigation, mass transit, and demand management instead of the roads people actually use. Now the same self-anointed transportation visionaries want to squander even more tax dollars on trains while starving highways of the revenue they need. Colorado does not need CoCo. It needs grown-ups with asphalt, math, and the humility to stop treating working drivers like an inconvenience to their rail fantasy.

Source: BizWest