Denver’s Regional Transit District (RTD) has a tough decision to make. Should it spend under $300 million on bus-rapid transit and get an estimated 16,300 to 26,600 daily riders? Or should it spend $600 million to $700 million on a commuter train that is projected to attract 2,100 to 3,400 daily riders?

To officials in the cities of Boulder and Longmont, this is a no-brainer. Every other major city in the Denver urban area is getting a train, so therefore they need a train too, no matter what the cost and how few the riders. RTD’s general manager piously says, “we want to reach a consensus with the stakeholders,” referring to the fact that Boulder, Longmont, and other city officials only agreed to RTD’s multi-billion-dollar “SlowTracks” rail scheme in the first place on the condition that every major city would get a rail line.

While it seems absurd to spend twice as much money on a technology that will attract barely a tenth as many riders, the truth is that bus-rapid transit would perform better than trains in all of the region’s major corridors. RTD simply ignored that option in those other corridors, even when its own analysis showed that buses were better than trains (which it did every time RTD did a complete alternatives analysis).

The only reason buses were given serious consideration in the Boulder corridor is that there was no way to get train tracks into downtown Boulder. Instead, RTD’s original plan, approved by voters in 2004, proposed to use existing BNSF tracks that by-pass the heart of Boulder, continuing into Longmont while running BRT to downtown Boulder.

After the election, however, the projected costs of the proposed rail lines ballooned by 50 to 125 percent. Costs of the one BRT line in the plan grew by only 23 percent. The tax increase approved by voters wasn’t enough to pay for all the lines, and the agency’s analysis showed that the cost per rider on the Boulder-Longmont train would be more than $60, compared with $21 for one other train and $7 to $16 for the rest (see p. 7). Not building the Boulder-Longmont line would save enough to pay for almost a third of the cost overrun on the other lines.

As a result, some people hoped Boulder and Longmont would settle for BRT instead of rail. Fat chance. RTD’s “consensus” process has almost always resulted in the most expensive possible solution to any problem.

The fundamental problem, of course, is that rails don’t go where people want to go and are very expensive to build or move. Buses can go anywhere there are streets or roads, and do so for far less money and actually can carry more people per hour than almost any train. But buses don’t earn contractors fat profits and thus don’t provide huge contributions to political campaigns.

In 1990, before it began building rail transit, Denver’s transit system had the highest market share of commuters of any urban area in the Rocky Mountain West, while Las Vegas had the lowest. Since then, transit’s share has declined in Denver but more than doubled in Las Vegas, precisely because Vegas’s transit agency didn’t build any rail lines (the bankrupt monorail, which was privately funded, doesn’t count).

If RTD really wants to serve transit riders, it should stop all of its rail projects and focus on improving buses. In the meantime, Denver can serve as an example for other regions of what not to do.