Transit officials have been baring their souls to the public this week in a series of open houses across the metro area, allowing rail and bus riders systemwide to vent about the and the to the airport.
And in the midst of the string of well-attended meetings — about 150 people showed up at the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities on Wednesday and an additional 40 or so at the Wheat Ridge Recreation Center on Thursday night — the Regional Transportation District received some good news.
The Colorado Public Utilities Commission on Wednesday issued RTD its written orders denying the transit agency’s request to have its at-grade crossings certified on the A-Line and G-Line, the latter of which was supposed to start service a year ago.
The official release of PUC’s orders, , starts a 20-day clock for RTD to seek a re-hearing on the issues the commissioners objected to and hopefully sets the transit agency on a path away from the bureaucratic and technical snags in which it has found itself entangled for the past 18 months.
“We appreciate your patience,” RTD spokesman Nate Currey told the audience in Wheat Ridge on Thursday.
He said RTD was frustrated it took state regulators more than three weeks to issue their orders in writing, but now that it has the orders in hand it will ask for an expedited review from PUC.
RTD is getting help from those who have grown tired of . Arvada Mayor Marc Williams attended Wednesday’s open house, and within 24 hours of the meeting ending, the city website had added a section informing the public how to contact Gov. John Hickenlooper’s office, the PUC commissioners and RTD’s directors.
The mayor asked members of the community to reach out to the PUC and urge it “to take expeditious and necessary steps to open the G-Line.”
The urgency has arisen as RTD and its private-sector partner, Denver Transit Partners, have run into numerous challenges in the past year and a half getting its wireless crossing gate technology to work properly on the A-Line.
The agency was encouraged by that the timing of its crossing system finally passed muster with officials in Washington. But without the blessing of the PUC as well, RTD can’t remove dozens of flaggers , and it can’t resume full testing of the G-Line either.
And that has Arvada and Wheat Ridge residents frustrated about a fully built rail line into Denver on which no passengers can travel.
Carl Daly, who lives in Arvada and works in downtown Denver, attended Thursday’s meeting in Wheat Ridge and said the longer he has to wait for the train, the more upset he gets.
“We have all this infrastructure just sitting there empty,” he said after the meeting adjourned. “It’s a glaring symbol that this hasn’t gotten done.”
RTD, he said, may want to consider using a more conventional signaling system if it can’t get regulators to sign off on the one it has been trying to implement since early 2016.
“We’ve been running trains for 200 years,” Daly said.
RTD’s final open house is scheduled for 10 a.m. Saturday at Green Valley Ranch Recreation Center in Denver.