Osher, who lives just south of downtown and works near Union Station, thinks she’s living proof of the potential. “I always joke that I have this three-mile circle,” she says. “Everything I need is in that three miles, mostly on foot or transit.”

The spokesperson: There’s a persistent stigma around taking the bus.

FasTracks’s emphasis on shiny trains may have bolstered public support for the program, but it’s actually buses that are the workhorses of the new system. They provide the critical connections between rail lines, and make up a larger share of the transit agency’s service hours. Unfortunately, buses also get a bad rap, says Nate Currey, a spokesperson for the Regional Transportation District.

“I think there’s an unwarranted stigma around the bus,” Currey says. “People perceive it as a second-class service.” But when they’re done right, buses can be faster than rail, and a lot more flexible.

Nate Currey, a spokesperson for the Regional Transportation District (Courtesy of RTD)

RTD serves eight of the 12 counties in the Denver-Aurora-Boulder metro area, with over 2.8 million people in 2,400 square miles. Rail connects the region, but it can’t solve all of the region’s transportation needs.

A transit system as sprawling as the Denver region’s requires buy-in for multiple modes of transportation. Achieving that across 41 municipalities can be a daunting task, says Currey. To keep tax dollars flowing means enticing suburban drivers, and building out an option that’s more psychologically appealing, but often less efficient at hauling the masses: light rail.

In that way, Currey says, rail subsidizes buses, which are more expansive and get the most use by lower-income riders who are more dependent upon public transit. With rail-line completion dates possibly as far out as 2044, buses will need to fill the gaps. It’s a tricky tension, and some community advocates have criticized RTD for ignoring the areas of greatest need.

To keep up investment in transit for those who already ride it, the city needs to do a better job selling transit as a system, says Currey. “The storytelling side of it is important,” he says. “People see rail lines and think service level is going to be the same everywhere, but we have to do a better job conveying other modes as options.”

The consultant: Transit should look—and feel—geometric.

Denver’s current transit service is also limited in its design. The rail system is a hub-and-spoke design, with lines spanning out from downtown. That makes the distances for many people to get downtown a bit circuitous. The quickest trips match the time of a car ride, and it only takes an ill-timed transfer to create significant delays. Tom Brennan, the principal consultant at the firm Nelson/Nygaard on the Denver Moves transit plan, says that spaced-out service limits ease of use. If rail lines and buses were arranged more on a grid, it would take out some of the guesswork and delay.

Within the city of Denver, only about 34 percent of people live within walking distance from stops where a bus arrives every 15 minutes or less, far behind cities like Seattle or San Francisco. Building on the rounded, wheel-like system, a geometric quilt of bus lines that stitches the rail together would close those distances, and help create the frequency and predictability that draws riders. Brennan agrees with Osher that reliable bus service is particularly needed in the urban core, which was not the focus of FasTracks from the start.