Just when you thought news about the FasTracks Northwest rail line from Denver to Boulder and Longmont couldn’t get worse, it did — it got much worse.
It got so much worse, in fact, that RTD is actually considering other options than building this boondoggle, although we’re still a long way from putting sanity in charge and abandoning the project.
Back in 2004 when voters approved FasTracks, they were told the Northwest rail line would cost $565 million. In just four years that figure ballooned to an alarming $894 million because of construction add-ons, materials inflation and RTD’s decision to discard the rose-colored glasses it had conveniently donned for the ’04 election.
Now $894 million looks like the good old days. The latest breathtaking estimate: $1.714 billion.
As Cathy Proctor explains in the Denver Business Journal, the new price tag is a result of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway weighing in recently with what it would cost to build and operate the route, and RTD’s decision to push the completion date back to 2024 because of insufficient cash flow.
Nor is the cost escalation necessarily over. Proctor reports that the estimate could go up again when BNSF updates its projection in a few years.
What to do? RTD can’t leave the northwest suburbs high and dry and expect them to support another big tax hike for FasTracks. But given the peculiar nature of RTD’s original plan for the Northwest corridor, it doesn’t have to.
The Northwest corridor is unique in getting two FasTracks projects — not only a rail line but also “bus rapid transit” along U.S. Highway 36.
Bus rapid transit uses separate lanes and “side-loading stations for swift loading and unloading of passengers,” to quote RTD. The service is fast and flexible, and the buses don’t get bogged down in congestion as they do on regular lanes.
Yet FasTracks pays for only a portion of the projected bus rapid transit system along U.S. 36. The rest of the funding had to be raised by the Colorado Department of Transportation.
So far, CDOT has scraped together $307 million ($120 million from RTD) to extend tolled express/HOV lanes — the lanes on which buses will also ride — 10 miles from Pecos to Interlocken. Those lanes could be open by July 2015, but plans for the rest of the way to Boulder remain a work in progress. Why not redirect some FasTracks revenue that would have gone to the extravagant rail line to finishing bus rapid transit and extending it on to Longmont?
To their credit, elected officials in the corridor are at least open to exploring a version of this idea — even if they ultimately insist on rail at any cost. Boulder County Commissioner Will Toor tells me that one of the options they’ve asked RTD to analyze is spending $894 million (the previous estimate for the rail line, you’ll notice) on “bus rapid transit service improvements on U.S. 36 plus bus rapid transit through Boulder, and along the Longmont Diagonal, Highway 287 from Longmont to U.S. 36, and Highway 42 to Louisville.”
Local officials want to examine the impact of expanding bus rapid transit on mobility, travel times and economic development, and to compare it with rail, he added.
Back in 2004, the official projected cost per rider on the Northwest train was $16, more than twice as much as any other new corridor. And that cost projection was for all transit riders, not just new ones attracted to rail.
When the line’s price tag rose in 2008, cost per rider soared to an incredible $60.44.
Heaven knows what the $1.714 billion figure does to an already grotesque per-rider subsidy, but it surely isn’t pretty. The Northwest rail line wasn’t cost effective even in 2004, but now it’s an outright travesty.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at or vcarroll@denverpost.com. Follow him on Twitter @vcarrollDP
