Plans to extend Regional Transportation District’s twice-a-day commuter rail from Denver to Longmont at a cost of $650 million is not sensible, both critics and supporters of passenger rail systems said.

A feasibility report issued by the transit agency suggested that RTD can operate three trains twice a day — three hours in the morning and evening — on Burlington Northern freight rail tracks between Denver’s Union Station and Longmont for $12 to $16 million per year after spending $650 million for infrastructure improvements.

The report estimated the daily ridership of 1,100 boardings, which means 550 passengers in the morning and 550 passengers in the evening to and from Denver.

“Going by a standard revenue-cost ratio, this line is idiotic,” said Randal O’Toole, director of the Independence Institute’s Transportation Center. “At $2.75 per ticket (RTD’s current ticket price), with 1,100 riders per day, the line would produce a little over a million dollars per year. This is obviously nowhere close to the $12 to $17 million annual operating cost, much less the amortized value of the $650 million in capital costs.”

The think tank describes itself as a group that exists to “empower individuals and to educate citizens, legislators and opinion makers about public policies that enhance personal and economic freedom.”

The study said that providing service on tracks shared with freight trains “requires major infrastructure investment to the alignment, including upgrades to the track and communications systems, and an agreement with BNSF.”

Such a project would also require RTD to buy a whole new fleet of trains because overhead electric lines, which are used on its existing system, cannot be built along the line due to overhead clearance issues. Providing non-electrified commuter rail services would be new to RTD, according to a news release.

Fulfilling the 2004 promise of a rail line to Longmont is only fair, according to the office of Gov. Jared Polis.

“It’s imperative that RTD make good on their commitment to the voters who have been paying sales tax for a train that has not yet been delivered,” gubernatorial spokesperson Shelby Weiman said in a statement. “The good news is there could be a pathway through partnerships to finance the project much faster with RTD funds, state funds and federal funding appropriated by Congress through the Infrastructure and Investment Jobs Act of 2021 that can contribute to a more robust service from Denver to northern communities.”

The Northwest Rail extension has been promised since 2004, when voters approved the FasTracks rail system plan that resulted in RTD spending $6.6 billion by 2019 on its transit system.

Richard Bamber, co-founder of Greater Denver Transit, agrees with O’Toole that the Northwest Rail project isn’t economically feasible on its own.

“I can’t argue with that,” Bamber said. “So, what we have to do is we have to meld this into a project where we get to 5,000 trips a day. And the only way we’ve got to do is to take this plan and meld it into something where we can run trains all day.”

Bamber — whose organization says its advocates for an efficient, reliable, safe, accessible and inclusive public transit system — wants to integrate the Denver-to-Longmont service with the Front Range Passenger Rail plan to build a passenger rail system from Trinidad to Ft. Collins.

But that’s still years in the future, as that plan hasn’t yet settled on routing or come up with accurate cost estimates, which in the past have gone as high as $8 to $14 billion.

“The study kind of has come out with what we thought, where, for the costs you would invest to build the project, because you’re only going to run three trains down to Denver each day and then three trains back, the ridership is not going to justify just the cost,” said Bamber.

Bamber said that cost estimates have gone from $461 million to $1.5 billion in 2018, with RTD projecting it couldn’t be completed before 2044.

“Obviously, these dates are clearly unpalatable for politicians in Boulder and Longmont,” said Bamber. “They point out quite rightly their communities have been paying their fair share of FasTracks sales taxes and there is little rail progress to show for it.”

Bamber said the way to increase rail ridership is to stop building roads.

“As long as we cap building roads we keep making and you put out an attractive rail service, people will pick the train,” Bamber said. “The desire is if you put rail travel out there that is fast, frequent and reliable, people want to use it and will use it. I’m firmly of the belief that if you ran trains all day and seven days a week, you could be carrying 1.5 to 2 million people a year on this train.”

O’Toole said trains are obsolete and, for that kind of investment, RTD could move more people faster, cheaper, and more efficiently using buses.

“The feasibility study says nothing about a bus alternative, which makes sense only because the main purpose of the train is to keep the political promise to send a train to Longmont and not to provide sound or cost-effective transportation,” O’Toole said. “Any serious analysis would quickly show that RTD could provide faster, more frequent, limited-stop or non-stop buses serving the same cities that would carry more people for a far lower cost.”

“In sum, this is a political proposal to operate a political train that will provide negligible transportation benefits at a much higher cost than a bus line that could provide far greater transportation benefits,” O’Toole added.