The Denver Post’s John Aguilar reported bad news from the Front Range’s eight-county Regional Transportation District last week — revenues are going to fall short of projections, meaning cuts will have to be made.

The good news is that RTD will be able to avoid most cuts to services by scaling back on the number of construction projects and new routes it undertakes. That’s a retrenching with a focus on increasing use of existing services and it will keep the district from being spread too thin.

But the bad news is that a significant driver of the budget woes is that ridership isn’t keeping pace with expectations and, consequently, fare revenue will be less than anticipated. RTD reported that per-capita ridership is stagnant as the population grows.

Heather McKillop, RTD’s chief financial officer, said beginning in 2019 RTD expects to fall $30 million to $40 million shy of expected outlays every year for several years. Also contributing to the budget woes, she said, is smaller than anticipated growth in sales tax revenue. RTD has little control over that portion of its budget, however.

As the Front Range grapples with traffic, increasingly metropolitan areas are arguing that it’s not possible to build capacity for more cars. Increased transit, officials say, is the only option to relieve congestion. But that plan makes sense only if people are willing to use RTD services to get where they are going.

That’s why we find news of RTD’s budget shortfall such a bad omen. Now would be the time to invest in ways to get more of a market share of commuters using the already existing rail and bus routes, not to scale back.

Aguilar reported cities across RTD’s region are trying to solve this issue by bridging the first-mile/final mile of commuters’ trips to work or home. The hope of cities like Golden, Centennial and Lone Tree is that removing barriers to get to the light rail station will increase ridership.

As it is now, RTD has tentatively proposed reducing trains on the W-Line from every 15 minutes to every 30 minutes as part of its balanced budget. It’s hard to get too upset at RTD for entertaining that option, as ridership of the relatively new line between downtown Denver and Golden is significantly under-performing.

We hope Golden’s initiative to get more people on the light rail works, but until then it’s tough to justify the current level of services.

And that’s the kind of tough-love approach RTD must take with its services in the future. Because here’s the real pinch of the RTD budget: The base system — traditional bus services that weren’t a part of the 2004 voter-approved FasTracks rail lines and bus rapid transit commuter systems — is now subsidizing the FasTracks system.

McKillop said to balance the FasTracks side of the budget in coming years, money will have to be transferred from the base system to subsidize the commuter projects.

RTD must find a way to make FasTracks pull its own weight, and asking municipalities to step up and invest in increasing ridership seems to make good sense.

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