The fanciful idea of Front Range Passenger Rail continues to be touted at public forums up and down the Front Range. The tour made its latest whistle stop last week at the Mt. Carmel Veterans Service Center in Colorado Springs.

It’s a pipe dream that won’t go away. Unfortunately, it also continues to divert attention and resources from essential transportation infrastructure — i.e., highways — that is cramped and crumbling. In other words, transportation solutions overwhelmingly car-driving Coloradans actually need.

The latest chapter in the push for a Front Range Passenger Rail is a potential ballot measure for a sales tax to fund the envisioned service. It could appear on your ballot this year if you live in one of the dozen-plus communities along the proposed rail line’s north-south corridor — all part of a new district with taxing powers created for the scheme by the legislature in 2021.

The problem is pitfalls abound. Cities such as Pueblo and Colorado Springs would bleed tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to build the stations the project’s proponents speak of. The new district’s board still needs to negotiate and ultimately build a “starter service” of three trains a day in the northern Front Range by 2029 before funding extensions south of Denver with the proposed sales tax. 

And then there’s the challenge of using existing freight lines, assuming the district board is even able to negotiate usage. How fast could the trains even go if they have to slalom around freight trains along their route? Would there be demand for the resulting hour-and-45-minute train trip each way from Colorado Springs to Denver? At off-peak times, it’s well under an hour by car.

It all amounts to a fantasy — with little to no chance of happening — and that’s a good thing considering the cost. And if the service did start up, it would be a boondoggle for the ages. 

Fairly few casual day-trippers and almost no commuters would find it worth their while to use it — despite multimillion-dollar tax subsidies to operate it. It would be a train trip of little practical value, draining labor and resources along the way. 

The transportation dreamers — the self-styled visionaries of the Polis administration among them — keep using pie-in-the-sky solutions like the Front Range rail project to create a diversion. Rather than fix and upgrade our highway network, they can tell the motoring public snarled in traffic that help is on the way. Just head to the nearest train station.

And they can use such illusions to rationalize their continued siphoning of transportation funding from highways and toward alternative transportation like buses and bikes. Of course, that’s never going to get the vast majority of Coloradans from Point A to Point B.

It’s time to stop dreaming, wake up and start fully funding highways again. Empower independent drivers. The reality, for the vast majority of us, is living and working like a Coloradan means driving a car. 

Improve and expand the roadways Colorado craves. While Front Range rail advocates keep dreaming, the legislature and governor should be building — highways.