Woo-hoo! The ballyhooed Front Range passenger rail service now has a name — “Colorado Connector,” or “CoCo” for short — and its small circle of enthusiasts is superexcited. 

If only they could muster even a fraction as much interest in fixing and expanding our state’s crumbling roads and highways — which consistently rank among the nation’s very worst.

As reported by The Gazette, the Front Range Passenger Rail District and Gov. Jared Polis announced the winning new moniker Monday after nearly 26,000 Coloradans weighed in by way of a public naming contest staged to drum up support.

Of course, the train service isn’t running yet — and likely never will. 

That’s just as well because it’s a safe bet few of those 26,000 voters would hop aboard. Neither would just about anybody else along the Front Range.

The legislature created the rail district in 2021 on a wing and a prayer, along with some token state and federal seed money to help with planning. The real funding would come from a sales tax backers hope to place on this fall’s ballot. You’ll get to vote on it if you live in one of the district’s dozen-plus communities along the rail line’s north-south corridor.

It’s still unclear if the proposal will move forward in time for the November election. 

What is clear is the whole notion is a pipe dream — and would turn into a boondoggle if voters were to go along.

No one who actually wants to get somewhere in a practical amount of time would use it. A car traveling from Pueblo to Denver would beat the train in half the time even after accounting for the usual bottlenecks along I-25. 

It would be an instant money pit, and no combination of train fares and tax dollars would be enough to sustain the operation.

Meanwhile, Colorado’s real transportation grid — the highways that actually move us from Point A to Point B — is pretty much a national embarrassment.

The Reason Foundation’s respected, annual state-by-state rankings of the nation’s highways dinged Colorado once again last month. Reason ranked Colorado a dismal 42nd among the states for the overall condition of its highways — and in the bottom four for the miserable condition of its rural roads. 

It’s a familiar theme for the Centennial State, unfortunately. Last year, Reason ranked Colorado’s highways 45th in urban interstate pavement condition, 47th in rural interstate pavement condition and 40th in its urban fatality rate. Last year’s report also found, “Colorado ranks 36th out of the 50 states in traffic congestion, and its drivers spend 36 hours a year stuck in traffic congestion.”

It’s no secret our state’s transportation policymakers — notably, our governor and legislature — are starving our highways of badly needed revenue. Colorado’s Common Sense Institute concluded in a key report last year: “Transportation fees are not going to roads. Since 2017, the state has created or increased a number of transportation-related fees. The statutes authorizing them have directed the bulk of the dollars collected toward environmental mitigation, mass transit, and demand management efforts rather than roads, further exacerbating the state’s infrastructure problems.”

Now, our state’s self-anointed transportation visionaries seek to squander tax dollars on trains, too — as they continue to neglect the only means of transportation that really matters.

The only consolation in any of that is this latest distraction is so ill-conceived and poorly planned, it’s unlikely to make it off the drawing board.