RTD officials are puzzled about a steep drop in ridership on the transit system’s light-rail trains so far this year when compared with 2018.

A report shared with the Regional Transportation District’s elected directors this week didn’t cite any one reason that immediately explains why 13.7 percent fewer passengers rode light rail during the first five months of 2019 than did during the same period last year.

RTD spokeswoman Pauletta Tonilas said the ridership decline on the 58.5 miles of light-rail track in metro Denver is “a pretty big drop” and “an anomaly.” RTD’s light-rail system has steadily expanded since the first line launched in 1994, with the most recent segment — an extension of the southeast corridor in Douglas County — opening in May.

“Usually what we see with light-rail ridership is it continues to go up, so that’s why we’re just sort of puzzled by it,” Tonilas said Friday.

RTD isn’t flying completely blind on the issue. She pointed to several factors that could be working together to dampen enthusiasm for light rail, which serves downtown Denver, Aurora, Lakewood, Golden and a large sweep of the metro area’s southern suburbs.

Light-rail riders aren’t happy about a drop in on-time performance, according to a recent customer satisfaction survey, Tonilas said. There’s also the fact that RTD fares for all modes of transit rose for the first time in three years in January, she said.

People who use light rail, she said, are typically those who have more access to a car and may resort to driving out of convenience or when gas prices drop. And as real estate prices have climbed around light-rail stations, with more multifamily buildings going up, that has pushed people out to more affordable areas where “it may not be as conducive to take light rail,” Tonilas said.

While light-rail ridership has fallen, RTD said ridership has jumped on bus routes, commuter rail lines such as the University of Colorado A-Line, and the Flatiron Flyer bus service between Denver and Boulder. Still, overall ridership across RTD’s entire system fell 1.8 percent from early 2018 to early 2019.

“I think it speaks to the overall weakness of the transit system in Denver,” said Ben Fried, a spokesman for New York-based TransitCenter, a foundation that works to improve transit nationwide. “In New York City, the transit habit is firmly entrenched — in Denver, you have transit habits that are not as firmly embedded.”

He said bus routes need to be added to the system to better connect light-rail corridors across the metro area to create a more comprehensive, user-friendly network.

To be fair, Denver isn’t the only light-rail system suffering ridership declines. According to data from the American Public Transportation Association, systems in Los Angeles and Cleveland experienced a similar percentage drop-off in passengers from the first quarter of 2018 to the first quarter this year.

But most light-rail systems in big American cities did much better than RTD year over year, according to APTA data, experiencing a far less precipitous decline or even gaining passengers.

RTD Director Natalie Menten said the less-than-rapid speed of light-rail trains on RTD’s system isn’t helping boost ridership. It takes 40 minutes to travel 12 miles from Golden to Denver on the W-Line.

“Its slow travel time is a consistent complaint since it opened in 2013,” Menten said. “The Aurora line (R-Line) is just as bad.”

A full-length trip from the Ridgegate Parkway station in Lone Tree to Peoria Station in Aurora on the R-Line, a distance of 22 miles, takes a full hour. Declining ridership two years ago prompted RTD to reduce service frequency on both lines.

“Personally, I think it’s about convenient life choices coupled with cost,” Menten said. “Why get on public transit, which limits the convenience to briefly stop and purchase an item, quickly return library books, or carry 50 pounds of dog food home for the family dog? Add those tasks to public transit, and you’re giving up hours of your life to get from point A to B.”