RTD Ridership Stalls While Satisfaction Rises

The Denver Gazette’s Scott Weiser reports that RTD is taking a fresh victory lap after its annual customer and community surveys showed rising satisfaction among the people still riding buses and trains.

That is not nothing. Happy customers matter. RTD reported 82% satisfaction among bus riders and 87% among rail riders. Good for them. But the same article notes the bigger, uglier fact sitting right there in the middle of the room: overall transit use remains stagnant, systemwide ridership is still about 38% below 2019 levels, and the public’s daily habits are not exactly screaming, “Take my keys, bureaucrats.”

The Bullet Point Brief

• RTD says its riders are happier, with 82% satisfaction among bus customers and 87% among rail customers. That is useful information, assuming we remember the survey is measuring people already on the system, not the millions still choosing their driveway.
• The agency’s CEO says the results show transit continues to play an important role in connecting metro Denver. Fair enough. A ladder also plays an important role, but that does not mean everyone wants to commute on one.
• The Denver Gazette reports that systemwide ridership remains about 38% below 2019 levels. That is the giant concrete cow pie in the press release. You can put flowers around it, but it is still there.
• The article also notes that roughly 90% of downtown trips and 96% of all commutes still rely on personal vehicles. Apparently, Coloradans did not get the memo that they were supposed to become Danish urban planners by Tuesday.
• Transit officials and planners keep talking about bus rapid transit, signal priority, road design, and “options.” Normal people keep asking whether the thing works for school drop-off, grocery runs, job sites, snowstorms, soccer practice, late shifts, and life outside a PowerPoint slide.

My Bottom Line

Here is the difference RTD and the transit-planning priesthood keep trying to blur: satisfaction among remaining riders is not the same thing as a public mandate.

If the people still using buses and trains are happier, good. Improve the service. Make it safer. Make it cleaner. Make it more reliable. Nobody serious should root for a public system to be miserable. But spare us the confetti cannon routine where every survey bump becomes proof that Denver is one bike lane and three grant-funded consultants away from Copenhagen.

The problem is not that Coloradans hate transit. The problem is that most Coloradans have lives that do not fit neatly onto a bus schedule. They haul kids. They carry tools. They shop in bulk. They work odd hours. They drive between places that were not designed by a downtown committee with a lanyard and a moral superiority complex. They live in the real Front Range, not the fantasy brochure version where everyone sips oat milk at a light rail stop while waiting for utopia.

So yes, RTD can celebrate happier riders. But the broader public is still voting with its keys. And until the transit universe matches how people actually live, work, commute, and survive in Colorado, taxpayers are going to keep hearing about the grand transit future while looking at their actual Tuesday morning and saying, “Yeah, I’m driving.”

Source: The Denver Gazette