We’re being asked to support a new tax for a different train at the exact moment RTD is gearing up to cut the services people in Broomfield actually use. That disconnect matters more than any glossy rail rendering or ribbon cutting ceremony.
Different RTD committees are floating service cuts of 5 or 10 percent, with talk of a worst case scenario reaching up to 20 percent. The list of what could be on the chopping block is not abstract: FlexRide zones, Route 228, 112, LD, and even Route 53, which was just extended and promoted as a win for local connectivity. These aren’t luxuries. They’re the basic routes that get workers to shifts, students to class, and older adults to appointments.
When you look at RTD’s own performance and subsidy data from the late 2010s, you see a pattern: Broomfield and its neighbors pay heavily to keep routes and FlexRide service alive, even when those services don’t fully serve Broomfield or skip key parts of the community. Local officials and advocates have put the number at roughly five million dollars a year in subsidy for services that often don’t come close to matching what residents are putting in. The numbers have likely only grown since then as costs rise and RTD keeps chasing “efficiencies.”
Meanwhile, the public conversation is shifting toward new taxes for more rail. On paper, that sounds like progress. Who doesn’t like the idea of sleek trains and grand regional connections? But if your daily reality is waiting for a FlexRide that might be cut or standing at a Route 228 stop that may vanish, a future train somewhere else in the metro area is not much comfort. You’re being told to pay for something distant and uncertain while the thing you already rely on is getting thinner.
Broomfield has leaned hard into FlexRide as a lifeline: local outreach, freefare promotions over summer, city messaging that tells people this is their first mile, last mile solution. Now those same riders are being told there might be less of it, and that the fixed route backbone that made some trips possible without a call ahead van could disappear. That is not what shared sacrifice looks like. It’s a one way street where the region gets new toys and the suburbs get smaller service windows.
At some point you have to ask a simple question: if RTD is willing to cut these everyday routes, why should Broomfield residents sign off on paying for someone else’s train? The people who depend most on transit aren’t asking for prestige projects. They’re asking for a bus that still comes, a FlexRide that still runs, and a system that recognizes their lives as worth serving. Until the agency can demonstrate that it will protect core service in places like Broomfield, any new tax for “different trains” feels less like progress and more like a bad trade dressed up in hopeful language.
https://www.rtd-denver.com/service-changes/proposed-september-26-service-changes
https://www.greaterdenvertransit.com/frontrangepickerail/