Metro Denver’s transit system covers over 2,000 square miles and serves over 3 million people, but locals often complain that the Regional Transportation District doesn’t work very well. In fact, they say that RTD actually stands for Reason to Drive.
A recent study commissioned by the Alliance to Transform Transportation, a coalition of nonprofits and advocacy groups that pushes for expanded public transit in Colorado, found that just 35 percent of residents in RTD’s service area live within a ten-minute walk of frequent transit.
City dwellers can dart around on buses and the occasional light rail, but people who live or work outside of central Denver are less fortunate, according to Mike Hager, and that’s especially true since the pandemic. Hager commutes daily from his home near Orchard and Havana streets in unincorporated Denver County near Greenwood Village to the Central Business District for his job as a technology business manager. Before COVID, Hager took the F or E light rail lines from RTD’s Arapahoe Station to his office, a trip that took about thirty minutes…