College student Vincent Yates starts his daily commute at the Arapahoe park-n-Ride, where he catches the 26X bus to the light-rail station at Interstate 25 and South Broadway.
From there, Yates typically transfers to the train to complete his trip to the University of Colorado at Denver.
Starting Friday morning, however, Yates will have a new route that will save him 15 minutes. He will simply catch the train at the Arapahoe station, not far from his Centennial home, and ride all the way to the Auraria campus.
“I think it will be awesome,” said Yates, a 22-year-old physics major, about the opening of new southeast light-rail service.
The 19-mile line, built as part of the $1.7 billion T-REX project, is expected to handle at least 33,000 passenger trips a day and will double the number of miles and daily passenger trips in RTD’s light-rail system.
The new train is expected to trigger the most sweeping change in metro Denver commuting patterns in decades.
“It will come more often. That’s what I’m excited about,” Yates said.
The southeast line will connect downtown Denver and the Denver Tech Center – “the two largest labor pools not only in the state, but the whole Rocky Mountain region,” said Southeast Business Partnership president John Lay.
“It will do for this entire corridor what Larimer Square and Coors Field did for Lower Downtown Denver,” Lay said. “It vaults us forward.”
Already, the Denver Marriott Tech Center is getting inquiries from business customers who are drawn by the hotel’s proximity to the Belleview rail station, said Barbara Readey, Marriott’s area general manager.
“It’s a great benefit for selling Denver as a destination,” she said.
Inaugural rides free
RTD will offer free service on the southeast line Friday from 11 a.m. to midnight, and the entire rail system will be free Saturday. Rail passengers will start paying Nov. 19, and thousands of Broncos fans are expected to use the new transit option that day to get to Invesco Field at Mile High.
RTD is retaining its BroncosRide express bus service as well.
The new rail line cost $880 million, with about two-thirds of the money coming from the federal government.
T-REX – short for Transportation Expansion Project – included another $795 million in new highway lanes, bridges and ramps on I-25 and Interstate 225. Cities and other entities contributed about $75 million more for additions to the project.
T-REX’s pairing of highway and transit expansion in a single project is what will make it so successful, said William Millar, president of the American Public Transportation Association.
“It’s a great national model,” Millar said.
The new rail line will have 13 stations and 7,500 parking spaces. RTD officials concede that parking capacity may be overwhelmed by commuter demand Nov. 20, the first regular weekday operation of the train.
“It’s going to be painful,” said O’Neill Quinlan, an RTD director who has long warned about the inadequate number of parking spaces.
Complications for some
The opening of the southeast line will complicate the commute of some RTD riders.
Chris Sorenson commutes from her home in Parker to work at the Colorado Department of Human Services on RTD’s regional bus.
She parks her car at RTD’s lot in Parker and takes the P route all the way to Civic Center station, only a block from her job near the state Capitol.
When southeast train service starts, the P and many other express and regional bus routes between the suburbs and downtown will be eliminated.
Instead, commuters will be encouraged to take local, “circulator” buses to rail stations, or use a new call-n-Ride service that resembles a taxi operation.
Sorenson plans to take a bus from the Parker lot to the end-of-line Lincoln Avenue rail station, ride the train to downtown Denver’s 16th Street Mall, and then either walk or hop on the mall shuttle to get to work.
“The time will be the same or even a little longer,” she said.
Still, Sorenson is not complaining. “I think light rail will be good if traffic is stopped on the highway or if the weather is bad. We’ll still be going.”
Early and under budget
The southeast line was completed under budget and earlier than originally planned. It’s not often that mega projects like T-REX have money left over after construction.
“We had a good contractor that was very fair with us and knew what it was doing,” said T-REX project director Rick Clarke, a top RTD official. “We also had our share of luck.”
Officials won’t know the size of the surplus until accounts are reconciled.
Extra money will be spent on “enhancements” to the project, including a pedestrian bridge from the County Line rail station to Park Meadows mall.
T-REX construction began five years ago. The project originally was expected to stretch into 2008, but the winning bidder pledged to finish by the end of this year.
Rail transit is undergoing a resurgence in the United States, Millar said.
“It’s important to have a very good bus system,” he said, but “there is a volume of passengers that only rail can carry efficiently.”
Sorenson, the Parker commuter, said she will stick with public transit, even though she will often be transferring from bus to train to shuttle bus.
“I’ll do it because I don’t want to drive or pay to park downtown,” she said.
After all, she said, transit commuting “is my only downtime.”
Staff writer Jeffrey Leib can be reached at 303-954-1645 or jleib@denverpost.com.
Get the facts
More information on new bus and train routes and schedules can be found at southeastlightrail.com or by calling 303-299-6000 in the Denver/Boulder area. Outside the 303 area code, call 800-366-7433.
A “how to” video, produced by the Southeast Business Partnership and RTD, is available for new light-rail riders. The six-minute video describes how to purchase tickets and ride the new light-rail line. The video can be viewed at trainyourself.sebpconnections.com, or you can get a copy by calling 303-792-9447.
