You rarely have to fight for a seat if you ride the Denver metro area’s Regional Transportation District (RTD). On plenty of routes you might have a bus all to yourself — or even an entire light-rail train.
The same goes for Mountain Metropolitan Transit in the state’s No. 2 metro area, Colorado Springs. On some routes, its buses often enough seem to be ferrying ghosts around the sprawling Springs area.
It’s true of many public transit systems, of course — an impolite truth that makes even the most ardent advocates of mass transit fall silent…