Day and night, for more than a year, they’ve been out there — reflective safety vests cinched tight and handheld stop signs at the ready as train after train roars past.
The flaggers along the University of Colorado A-Line don’t come cheap. The price tag to man the 11 at-grade crossings along the 23-mile train route out to Denver International Airport since it opened a year ago: nearly $6 million and counting, according to calculations made by The Denver Post.
That cost, while not borne by taxpayers but rather by the private consortium that teamed up with the Regional Transportation District to build and operate the $1.2 billion line connecting downtown Denver to DIA, is perhaps the most visible and vexing sign that the state’s pre-eminent transit project has had a far rockier rollout than many had hoped.
Aside from multiple delays and service interruptions throughout the first year of operations on the A-Line — the first commuter rail line to be built in Colorado — problems at the crossings have had the biggest ripple effect. As long as hang-ups persist with the timing of the gates that stop motorists from driving onto the tracks, there can be no progress on opening the G-Line to the western suburbs.
That line, first set to open last fall, is designed to employ the same crossing technology as the A-Line.
“Certainly, it hasn’t gone as everybody planned,” said Lorraine Anderson, an RTD board director who represents the Arvada area.
Andrew Goetz, a professor of geography at the University of Denver who specializes in transportation and transit systems, said the A-Line’s first-year glitches could spell trouble for RTD as a whole if not addressed in short order.
“It boggles my mind that they haven’t been able to figure it out,” he said. “To not have this problem fixed nearly a year into operation, that’s a big publicity problem.”
RTD general manager and CEO Dave Genova conceded as much during a recent interview with The Denver Post.
“It’s priority number one to address these grade crossings,” he said. “It generates questions in people’s minds.”
The challenge at the crossings is fairly straightforward, according to RTD: The arms close too early and open too late.
The agency says the mistiming is caused by software that hasn’t mastered the task of precisely meshing lift and lower times with the positive train control system that integrates safety into the entire line. And until the issue is put to bed, federal regulators and the Colorado Public Utilities Commission require the flaggers be present as a safety backup.
RTD’s private sector partner, Denver Transit Partners, built and operates the A-Line. DTP — made up of heavy-hitting engineering, construction and investment firms Fluor Corp., John Laing Group, Aberdeen Infrastructure Investments, Balfour Beatty Rail, and Ames Construction — wouldn’t disclose the cost of having flaggers at the crossings, saying only that the money “does not come out of taxpayer dollars and is paid for by the private consortium.”
But a public records request with the Denver and Aurora police departments — two of the crossings are in Aurora — revealed that the nine officers assigned to the crossings 24 hours a day since March 2016 were paid an initial rate of $50 an hour that later rose to $55 an hour. The Denver Post calculated the officers’ services to have come at a total cost of nearly $4.3 million over the past year.
The Denver Police Department said starting Sunday, it will no longer station officers at the crossings at Dahlia and Holly streets.
Then there are 13 around-the-clock civilian contract flaggers, paid $13 an hour to start, working the crossings each day. Their total compensation: more than $1.5 million.
The Post conservatively estimates that by the A-Line’s one-year anniversary on April 22, staffing the crossings will have run up a bill of more than $5.8 million.
And for now, there is no end in sight.
Genova, whose 2016 bonus was docked by the RTD board of directors due in part to the challenges experienced by the A-Line, said the agency plans to ask the Federal Railroad Administration for another waiver — it’s not certain for how long — to operate the airport train with the flaggers in place.
The current waiver expires April 30.
“Ridership numbers tell the story”
RTD chairman Larry Hoy said while he would “like the performance to be better” on the A-Line, overall the project “has gone well” over the past year.
“I think the ridership numbers tell the story,” Hoy said, citing an average of 18,000 daily riders on the A-Line in 2016.
RTD projected having a daily ridership of 18,600 by April 22.
The number of riders per month generally rose last year, peaking with 571,582 in September before dipping somewhat over the next few months and then going back up to 551,338 in December. The number of A-Line riders dropped in January to 444,323, which can largely be attributed to coming off one of the busiest travel months of the year.
Through January, the most recent month for which data are available, more than 4.5 million people have taken the A-Line.
“The rider numbers are showing that people are accepting it and liking to take the train,” Hoy said.
That’s true for Michelle Jackson, a Denver digital marketer who says she grew up in the metro area at a time when the idea of rail-based transit in Colorado was an absurd concept. She has taken the A-Line to the airport eight to 10 times and never experienced more than a 20-minute delay on what is advertised as a 37-minute ride from Union Station.
She’s heard the nightmare stories of people getting stuck at an intermediate station and having to call a cab at the last minute to make their flight — or the widely reported evacuation of passengers from a disabled A-Line train on top of a bridge last May — but she said delays happen on train systems the world over.
“I think people are a bit hysterical — they are looking at these incidents and not the big picture,” Jackson said. “That’s a lot of people being served every day.”
But when a delay happens, it’s hard to forgive and forget. Steve Weil, president of Denver-based Rockmount Ranch Wear, said he experienced a maddening episode on the A-Line just last month, when both ends of his week-long trip to Puerto Rico were beset by stalled trains.
On the way out of town, the train was stuck at Union Station, forcing Weil and his family to spend $85 on an Uber car to get to DIA. On his way home, the train inexplicably ended its journey at the Peoria Station, he said, forcing him to take a bus to downtown Denver and adding an hour to his trip.
“Why are there no announcements? How come they don’t do a case study of what went wrong here?” he said. “I was a big supporter — I thought this would be good for downtown. But if you miss flights because of it, it’s counterproductive.”
Just last week, RTD sent out an email alert to riders announcing the sudden cancellation of two early-morning A-Line trains, citing “operational difficulties” for the interruption.
Weil asked: “Is my experience an exception, or the norm?”
RTD says the A-Line has an 89 percent on-time rate, meaning that 89 percent of trips arrive within five minutes of their scheduled time. For every person who is badly delayed in their travels, dozens of people quietly make the trip without incident — and without headlines.
“Despite some challenges, the overwhelming majority (98 percent) of trips arrive within 15 minutes of their scheduled arrival time,” said John Thompson, executive project director and CEO of Denver Transit Partners. “Passengers continue to take the train, exceeding 2016 ridership projections in about the half the time we expected.”
A-Line advocates, like Jackson, say people remember the bad episodes more vividly than when things are going smoothly. As for the flaggers, Jackson said her trips on the A-Line have never been impacted by their presence. She said she’s just happy the train, which is part of the 2004 voter-approved FasTracks project, was put into service at all.
“Once the city gets transit, it really transforms it into a much more world-class city,” Jackson said. “That to me is a miracle for a city that was born on cars.”
Growing pains
Linda Cherrington, a research scientist with the Texas Transportation Institute who has looked closely at commuter rail systems nationwide, said RTD is not alone with the problems it is enduring on the A-Line.
She pointed to the two-year delayed opening of the Capital MetroRail commuter train in Austin, Texas, in 2010, which also involved difficulties with grade crossing technology. And in northern California, the 43-mile SMART commuter rail line connecting Santa Rosa and San Rafael was supposed to open last fall. Issues with the train’s diesel engines, staffing shortages and problems with grade crossings and electric circuits have set back the line’s opening until later this spring, according to a story in last week’s San Francisco Chronicle.
“I would have expected there would be growing pains — there are in every implementation of a project,” Cherrington said.
Part of the problem, she said, is that transit agencies are used to dealing with light rail and the rules that come with them, issued by the Federal Transit Administration. With commuter rail, the FRA is in charge, and that can mean unforeseen challenges for transit agencies.
“It’s not unusual to have problems when you come down to these issues because of the mixed operating environment,” she said.
Cherrington commended RTD for moving ahead with its service instead of depriving the metro area of a train to the airport while trying to work out every last bug before throwing the power on.
Even Goetz, the DU professor who calls the troubles on the A-Line “deeply concerning,” said had RTD not entered into a public-private partnership with DTP to build the A-Line, the G-Line and the B-Line to Westminster, there would be nothing to complain about because there would be no train. The arrangement, colloquially called a P3, allows the private sector to put in a chunk of the initial investment — $450 million in this case — and assume a chunk of the risk while allowing the project to commence in a more timely fashion.
“These lines would have been delayed a lot longer without the P3 approach,” said Goetz, who a co-authored a study released last year of public-private partnerships with a focus on the A-Line.
Genova said the 34-year deal with DTP, which began in 2010, is treading new ground and as such is prone to unique challenges.
“It’s the biggest P3 in transit in the country and really the only one of its nature here in the country,” he said.
Genova said “tens and tens and tens and tens” of people are working on the crossing issues every day, and Wilmerding, Penn.-based Wabtec Xorail, a firm that specializes in positive train control systems for the railroad industry, has been hired as a consultant to help expedite a solution to what has turned out to be a particularly complex problem.
“We’re the first commuter rail operator in the country that has built in positive train control from the ground up,” he said. “The two components that we’re doing that others aren’t is a wireless communication to the grade crossing, and the other component is we’re actually using the positive train control to activate those grade crossings.”
As engineers try to get the gates to close at the design time mandated by federal regulators, Genova said, they are only able to test changes and adjustments to the software and hardware during the three hours or so in the early morning when the train isn’t running. That prolongs the process beyond what RTD wants, he said.
In the meantime, per RTD’s contract with DTP, the agency has consistently withheld payments from the consortium for its shortcomings in service and the ongoing crossing issues. Total penalties to date have reached $2.5 million. Anderson, the RTD director, said those sanctions coupled with DTP’s own desire to make money on the project give her confidence that the problems will be fixed sooner than later.
At which point, the G-Line can open to the public.
“These people invested in this to make a profit, and so it is to their benefit to fix this so they get a return on their investment ASAP,” she said. “(The G-Line opening) surely has to be this year.”
RTD isn’t saying when it thinks the G-Line will go online but points out that once the A-Line passes muster with federal and state officials, there will need to be two to three months of testing and training on the new line to Arvada and Wheat Ridge before it can open. That means a debut of the G-Line would happen no sooner than this summer.
Arvada Mayor Marc Williams hasn’t given up on the G-Line. The city has three stops in the 11-mile corridor and at least two of them — the Olde Town and Arvada Ridge stations — are primed for dense transit-oriented development. In 2015, it was announced that Arvada’s downtown was putting into the pipeline $227 million worth of multi-family residential projects boasting 780 new units, all in anticipation of the new line.
Just last month, the $23 million, five-story Hilton Garden Inn opened within walking distance of the new train station. It is the first and only hotel in Arvada.
Williams isn’t worried that the delay will prompt developers to abandon their plans in the city and said the fact that the line is already fully constructed, rather than merely in the planning stages, offers him assurance that the project won’t go to the “scrap heap.”
“It’s obviously much closer to reality than the vision it was a few years ago,” he said. “Long term, it’s going to benefit Arvada.”
