At a projected cost of more than $4.7 billion, a Front Range passenger train would be breathtakingly expensive. Yet it would provide almost no benefits to the region: no congestion relief, no reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, and no transportation that could not be provided by buses at a far lower cost.
Despite this, the Front Range Passenger Rail District recently released its “delivery plan,” a slick document that makes all sorts of vague promises that the district will never be able to keep. Traffic congestion is getting worse, says the document, and the only solution it offers is for taxpayers to pay through the nose funding a handful of trains between Fort Collins and Pueblo.
We’ve heard this before. Back in 2004, Denver’s Regional Transit District said that the only solution to increasing traffic congestion was FasTracks, which was supposed to cost a coincidental $4.7 billion for 148 miles of new rail transit lines in the Denver metro area. Advocates promised that FasTracks would be completed by 2016 and would take more than 240,000 cars off the road each day…