Agency kept service to frontline workers, low-income riders as it made cuts to buses, rail during pandemic
As the pandemic raged across Denver and its suburbs, leaders at RTD were concerned that cuts the agency needed to make across its bus and rail routes would fall hardest on the most vulnerable.
The frontline workers, the hourly employees — those without the luxury of being able to work from home — would be impacted the most, said Angie Rivera-Malpiede, chair of the Regional Transportation District’s board of directors.
“These are the folks who depend on us,” she said. “The people who need us to survive.”
RTD reduced service across its network by 31% from prepandemic levels as ridership plunged by 60%. But the agency made a concerted effort to keep routes serving low-income and transit-reliant neighborhoods at a more robust level of operation than many of its other lines connecting the city to the suburbs.
According to an “equity analysis” report released by RTD this month, “low-income routes had a 13% smaller reduction compared to higher-income routes, and minority routes had a 29% smaller reduction than non-minority routes.”
The report is required by the Federal Transit Administration as part of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
“RTD used a careful eye and took a strategic approach to maintaining service for communities of color,” Carl Green Jr., RTD’s newly appointed transit equity manager, said. “Who is more likely to receive more of the burden (of coronavirus)? The service was retained more for these populations.”
A special focus was placed on bus routes that serve the most
transit-dependent riders in metro Denver, such as the 15 and 16 along Colfax Avenue, the 121 on Peoria Street in Aurora, the 0 bus up and down Broadway, and Route 43 along Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. Access to hospitals, clinics and major employment centers was key in how the agency assigned service cuts, said Zamy Silva, senior manager with RTD’s Civil Rights Division.
“When you make service changes, you can’t make them in a vacuum,” she said.
“You can’t make these decisions without understanding the community we serve. This is all they have — transit is what they depend on.”
RTD wasn’t alone in the more surgical approach to curtailing service during the pandemic, said Ben Fried, a communications strategist at New Yorkbased TransitCenter.
He pointed to the King County Metro Transit Department in Seattle and the MBTA in Boston as agencies that stood out in highlighting equity in their coronavirus-fueled service cuts.
RTD received the most complaints about overcrowding or being passed up by a bus on urban arterial lines, or as the equity analysis report noted, the routes with “a higher number of minority and lowincome customers compared to the system district average.”
Deyanira Zavala, executive director of Mile High Connects, said RTD was right to give special attention to its most dependent customers but said there’s still room for improvement.
“RTD tried to meet the moment but definitely stumbled along the way,” she said.
“I feel that it was slow to respond.”
Zavala said the agency was late in lifting fares during the early months of the pandemic, in instituting rear-door boarding and in providing personal protective equipment to drivers and operators. And while the data about moderated service reductions on some lines is good, she said any cuts to a transitdependent corridor hits harder than in places where more transportation options exist.
“We can’t be satisfied with having moderately fewer impacts on lowincome folks who don’t have the option to work from home,” she said. “How can we meet the moment faster in the future?”