Updated May 12, 2026

Two Denver transit surveys are open right now.
Here's what to say.

The City of Denver wants to know what should happen to the L Line on Welton Street. CDOT wants to know how to build the new Colorado Boulevard bus line. Both decisions will shape how the east side of Denver moves for the next 30 years. We think you should vote to keep the train on Welton and put the buses in the middle of Colorado. Here's why, in detail, with sources.

Welton survey closes in
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Closes Friday, May 15 at 11:59 PM Mountain
Take the Welton survey → Take the Colorado Blvd survey →
In a sentence
Welton: keep the train, restore the missing service to 38th & Blake.
In a sentence
Colorado Blvd: pick Alternative 3 (buses in the middle). Side-running only as fallback.
Time you'll spend
About 4 minutes to answer both surveys if you only fill out what matters.
Welton Next Steps

Keep the L Line on Welton Street.

Denver's planning department is asking whether to keep the existing light rail or replace it with "enhanced bus." There's a real risk this turns into the second time in 75 years that Five Points loses its rail.

What this is about

The L Line is the short branch of light rail that runs from 30th & Downing through Five Points to downtown. It opened in 1994 as part of Denver's very first light rail line, the Central Corridor.[3] Before that, this same street carried streetcars run by the Denver Tramway Corporation until they were shut down on June 3, 1950.[5] Five Points was the heart of Denver's Black neighborhood through the segregation era and is officially designated as a Historic Cultural District.[4]

Service on the L Line has been cut back since 2020. RTD now runs it less often than it used to, and trains don't make the full historic route to 38th & Blake.[6] The current "Welton Next Steps" study is supposed to decide what to do next. The survey is the public's chance to weigh in.[2]

Where Welton Street, Broadway → Downing, plus Downing, Welton → Blake
What's there now RTD L Line light rail (reduced service)
Rail in service since 1994[3]
Streetcars ended June 3, 1950[5]
Who decides Denver Community Planning & Development
Survey closes Friday, May 15, 2026[2]
The two questions in the survey that decide this

Most of the survey is throat-clearing. Two questions actually choose between rail and bus.[2]

Question 3 · agree / disagree
"Light rail must be preserved and connected to 38th Avenue and Blake Street over all other corridor priorities, no matter how long it takes."
Answer: Strongly Agree.
Question 4 · pick one
"What statement do you most identify with at this time?"
  • Light rail should remain on Welton Street ← pick this one
  • Alternative forms of public transit (such as enhanced bus) should be explored
  • No preference
  • Other

Question 5 and Question 10 are open comment boxes. Use them. There's a paste-ready comment further down.

Why we think the train should stay
1

Once tracks come out, they almost never go back in.

The United States had around 500 streetcar systems in 1920. Fewer than ten still ran by the 1980s, and almost none of the corridors that were converted to bus ever got rail back.[7] The 1994 Central Corridor was a rare exception, and only because Welton's wide median was still there to put track on. Pull the rail up and within a decade utilities, repaving, and curb changes occupy the right-of-way. You don't get a second 1994.[8]

2

Rail makes property near it more valuable. Buses, much less so.

Hess and Almeida measured a 2–5% property-value increase per 100 feet of proximity to light rail stations in Buffalo.[9] Cervero and Duncan found commercial parcels near light rail in Santa Clara County worth up to 23% more than comparable parcels farther away.[10] A review of dozens of studies by Bartholomew and Ewing found that rail premiums are consistently bigger and more durable than bus premiums.[11] Investors, lenders, and homeowners read fixed tracks as a commitment. They don't read a bus route the same way, because a bus route can be moved.

3

Denver's growth has followed the rail.

Ratner and Goetz looked at where new transit-oriented development actually landed in metro Denver and found it concentrated at rail stations, not along bus routes. The Central Corridor (including Welton) was one of the earliest TOD anchors in the region.[12] The investment that has come to Five Points in the last fifteen years sits on top of that anchor.

4

The train is connected to the rest of the system. A replacement bus wouldn't be.

The L Line shares track with the D Line through the downtown loop. From there you can transfer to the A, B, G, and W lines at Union Station. A bus on Welton would force a transfer at one or both ends. Riders in stated-preference studies typically value avoiding a transfer at 5–15 minutes of in-vehicle time.[13] That's the kind of thing that quietly kills ridership.

5

Five Points already lost rail once. Doing it again is the same decision twice.

The Denver Tramway shutdown in 1950 took the streetcar out of Welton along with the rest of the city's surface rail.[5] When light rail came back in 1994, Five Points stakeholders described the restoration as a reversal of that loss.[4] Removing the rail again now, with the same "we'll give you buses instead" framing, would be the 1950 decision applied to a community that explicitly organized to get the train back.

Common objections, answered
If someone saysThe short answer is
The L Line is too expensive per rider. It's expensive per rider because RTD cut the service. The track cost is mostly fixed; the way to fix the ratio is to run more trains, not to tear out the asset.[6]
Buses are more flexible. Flexibility is exactly why a bus doesn't anchor real-estate investment. That's the finding in [9–11].
"Enhanced bus" can be built faster. The track is already in the ground. There's nothing to build. The fix is operational.
Most riders won't notice if it's a bus or a train. The people choosing whether to ride it in the first place do notice. Modal preference for rail over bus on equivalent routes is well-documented.[11,13]
What to write on the survey
QWhat it asksWhat to put
Q3"Better public transit is a priority no matter what type of transit is provided"Neutral or Agree (don't Strongly Agree; it reads as "any mode is fine")
Q3"Light rail must be preserved and connected to 38th & Blake"Strongly Agree
Q4Pick one: rail / enhanced bus / no preference / otherLight rail should remain on Welton Street
Q5Open comment about transitPaste the comment below
Q10Open comment, anything elseOptional; another chance to repeat the rail position
Copy and paste — Q5 comment

The L Line should stay on Welton, and full service should be restored to 38th & Blake. Five Points already lost surface rail once in 1950. Replacing the train with a bus a second time would undo the 1994 restoration that this community organized for. The capital asset is already built; the real problem is that service has been cut back. Run more trains, don't pull up the tracks.

Open the Welton survey →
Colorado Boulevard BRT

Put the buses in the middle of Colorado Boulevard.

CDOT is finalizing where to put the new bus rapid transit lane on Colorado. The choice between curb lane and center lane sounds technical. It's actually the entire project: a curb-lane BRT looks like BRT on paper and behaves like a regular bus in practice.

What this is about

CDOT, along with RTD, the City of Denver, Glendale, Arapahoe County, and DRCOG, is planning a Bus Rapid Transit line on Colorado Boulevard from I-70 down to the Southmoor station south of Hampden.[1] It's one of 11 BRT corridors in DRCOG's 2050 regional plan.[1] Colorado Boulevard is on Denver's High Injury Network, meaning it has a disproportionate share of the city's serious traffic crashes.[1]

The project is in the alternatives analysis phase of NEPA review. CDOT is picking the Locally Preferred Alternative this spring, then doing detailed design through spring 2027. The survey is meant to inform the LPA pick.[1,15]

Where Colorado Blvd, I-70 → Southmoor Station (about 10 miles)
Lead agency CDOT (with RTD, Denver, Glendale, Arapahoe Co., DRCOG)[1]
Project stage Alternatives analysis (NEPA), spring 2026[1]
Safety status On Denver's High Injury Network[1]
Open House Wed May 13, 5–7 PM, Clayton Early Learning Center[1]
The four alternatives on the survey
AltWhat it isBus has its own lane?Real BRT?
1Mixed flow — bus shares lane with carsNoNo
2Side-running — bus lane in the curb lane; cars use it for right turns and "business access"PartlySort of
3Center and side running — bus lane in the median where it can beYes, where centerYes
4No Build — leave the existing Route 40 busNoNo

The Institute for Transportation and Development Policy ranks BRT corridors on a Bronze/Silver/Gold scale. Center-running with median stations is essentially required to score Gold. Mixed-flow doesn't qualify as BRT at all under their scoring.[16]

Why the middle of the road is the right place for the bus
1

Right turns and delivery trucks eat curb-lane bus lanes.

Every driveway and every right-turn lane on Colorado is a place where a car has to cross a curb-side bus lane. Plus there's the daily stream of Amazon vans, double-parked rideshares, and delivery trucks. TCRP Report 90 documents this systematically: side-running and curb-running BRT lanes lose speed and reliability to those conflicts. Center-running keeps the bus away from all of it.[17] NACTO's Transit Street Design Guide recommends center transitways or, at minimum, offset bus lanes (one lane in from the curb) for streets with significant turning and curb activity.[18]

2

Dedicated lanes are where the BRT speed gains come from.

Levinson and colleagues looked at U.S. BRT corridors and found that the ones with their own running way cut travel times 30–50% versus the pre-BRT bus. The ones running in mixed traffic got under 15% improvement, sometimes none.[17] Cleveland's HealthLine, which is mostly center-running, saw roughly a 60% ridership increase in its first three years and is the most cited successful U.S. BRT case study.[19,20]

3

Side-running lanes degrade. Center-running lanes don't.

The FTA's review of BRT case studies (CBRT) notes that curb and side bus lanes need continuous enforcement to stay clear, and that enforcement usually slips within a couple of years.[20] A median-running lane is self-enforcing because it's physically separated from where cars need to be. One is a paint problem forever; the other is a geometry decision once.

4

Median stations are one of the best pedestrian safety interventions on a stroad.

Center stations require protected pedestrian crossings with refuge islands. On a seven-lane arterial, those refuges are the difference between making it across in one signal and getting stranded. Colorado Boulevard's place on the High Injury Network makes that benefit specific.[1,18]

5

The bait-and-switch is real.

ITDP has documented project after project branded "BRT" that delivered painted buses and nice stations but kept the buses in mixed traffic. They produce almost no travel-time benefit, and they consume the money and political will that was available for a real BRT.[16] Alternative 1 is structurally that pattern. Picking it would spend the corridor's one shot at this without delivering the thing.

6

Yes, center costs more. It's still cheap relative to what you get.

Center-running needs median stations and a few more signals. The marginal capital cost over side-running is typically reported in the 10–25% range on comparable U.S. corridors.[17,19] That's a one-time cost. The reliability benefit lasts the 30–50 year life of the infrastructure.

"But will this slow down my driving commute?"

Fair question. It's the first thing most people who drive Colorado every day will ask, and it deserves a real answer, not a hand-wave. The short version: probably no, and on most segments your drive may actually get slightly better after a brief adjustment period. The longer version:

1

You stop sharing your lane with the bus.

Right now the #40 pulls into and out of the right lane every few blocks to pick up riders. That's the kind of delay drivers actually feel on Colorado today. Center-running BRT takes the bus out of the curb lane entirely. The lane you drive in gets clearer, not more crowded.[17,18]

2

The bottleneck isn't lanes, it's signals.

Almost all peak-hour travel time on a stroad like Colorado is spent waiting at red lights, not moving slowly between them. Travel time on arterial corridors is dominated by signal cycle length and turning movements, not by raw lane count. Removing one through-lane doesn't make delay grow proportionally.[17]

3

A working BRT actually takes cars off the road.

A full standard bus carries roughly 40 people. That's the same number as about 30 cars at typical single-occupant peak occupancy. Cleveland's HealthLine recorded lower vehicle volumes on Euclid Avenue after BRT opened than before it, with no measurable spillover onto parallel streets.[19]

4

Induced demand works in reverse.

Duranton and Turner showed that adding road capacity generates new driving roughly one-for-one — the "fundamental law of road congestion".[21] The reverse is also well-documented: removing capacity on urban arterials tends to make some of the traffic evaporate rather than show up in full on the next street over. Cairns, Hass-Klau, and Goodwin reviewed 70 cases of capacity reduction internationally and found average traffic reductions of ~25% with no proportional displacement.[22,23]

5

The honest tradeoffs.

Some left turns and U-turns will be slower under center-running because they have to wait for a protected phase. CDOT's signal phasing can mitigate this but not eliminate it. There's also typically a 3–6 month adjustment window after a BRT opens where traffic patterns are still settling. On the heaviest segments at the heaviest hours, some drivers may see a few extra minutes for a while. That's the real cost. It's small relative to what the corridor gets.

6

Mixed-flow doesn't save your commute either.

Alternative 1 (mixed flow) keeps the bus in your lane forever. Pulling in and pulling out at every stop. The delay-from-buses you feel today doesn't go away in Alt 1 — you just don't get any transit benefit in exchange for keeping the lane. The same lane-removal complaint applies to Alt 2 (side running), where the curb lane becomes a bus-only lane with right-turns. Only Alt 3 (center running) both (a) frees the curb lane up for cars and (b) actually moves transit riders fast enough that mode-shift can reduce the cars in the through lanes.[16,17]

What to put on the CDOT survey
QWhat it asksWhat to put
Q3Pick 3 most important outcomes (out of 8)Improved bus travel time; Higher transit ridership; Better corridor safety
Q4aAlt 1 — Mixed Flow4 (Least preferred)
Q4bAlt 2 — Side Running2 (Preferred)
Q4cAlt 3 — Center and Side Running1 (Most preferred)
Q4dNo Build3 (above Alt 1, because No Build doesn't lock in a mixed-flow project marketed as BRT)
Q4eMain reason for your top choicePaste the comment below
Q53 most important station amenitiesProtection from weather; Real-time arrival information; Safety and security (lighting, visibility)
Q10Open commentOptional
Copy and paste — Q4e comment

Alternative 3 (Center and Side Running) is the only one that delivers the dedicated lane Bus Rapid Transit actually needs to be faster and more reliable than a regular bus. Curb-running lanes get eaten by right turns, deliveries, and double-parking; this is well-documented in NACTO guidance and FTA case studies. If center-running is not feasible on every block, use it on the busiest segments and stitch in side-running only where it has to be. Please do not select Alternative 1. A mixed-flow "BRT" is not BRT, and it spends this corridor's investment without delivering the benefits.

Open the Colorado Blvd survey →
Sources

Where this comes from.

Everything with a small number next to it is in the list below. Click any number in the text to jump here. We'd rather you check the sources than take our word for it.

  1. Colorado Department of Transportation. Colorado Boulevard Bus Rapid Transit — Study/Design Phase. codot.gov/projects/studies/denvermetrobrt/coloradoblvd. Accessed 2026-05-12.
  2. Denver Community Planning & Development. Welton Next Steps Survey. SurveyMonkey instrument at surveymonkey.com/r/SDXCXCJ. Accessed 2026-05-12.
  3. Regional Transportation District. RTD History. Central Corridor light rail entered revenue service October 7, 1994. rtd-denver.com.
  4. Denver Landmark Preservation Commission. Five Points Historic Cultural District designation documents. City and County of Denver. denvergov.org.
  5. Jones, W. C., & Forrest, K. Denver: A Pictorial History from Frontier Camp to Queen City of the Plains. Pruett, 1973. The last Denver Tramway streetcar ran June 3, 1950.
  6. RTD Board of Directors. Service reduction reports and L Line operating plans, 2020–2024. Regional Transportation District Board materials.
  7. Bianco, M. J. (1999). "Robert Moses and Lee Mertz: The Demise of the Streetcars and the History of the Federal Highway Trust Fund." Transportation Research Record 1685, 11–18.
  8. Vuchic, V. R. (2007). Urban Transit Systems and Technology. Wiley. Chapter on right-of-way classification and reversibility.
  9. Hess, D. B., & Almeida, T. M. (2007). "Impact of proximity to light rail rapid transit on station-area property values in Buffalo, New York." Urban Studies 44(5–6), 1041–1068.
  10. Cervero, R., & Duncan, M. (2002). "Transit's value-added effects: Light and commuter rail services and commercial land values." Transportation Research Record 1805, 8–15.
  11. Bartholomew, K., & Ewing, R. (2011). "Hedonic price effects of pedestrian- and transit-oriented development." Journal of Planning Literature 26(1), 18–34.
  12. Ratner, K. A., & Goetz, A. R. (2013). "The reshaping of land use and urban form in Denver through transit-oriented development." Cities 30, 31–46.
  13. Wardman, M., Hine, J., & Stradling, S. (2001). Interchange and Travel Choice. Scottish Executive Central Research Unit. See also Currie, G. (2005). "The demand performance of bus rapid transit." Journal of Public Transportation 8(1), 41–55.
  14. Denver Community Planning & Development. East Central Area Plan (2020) and Five Points business district plans. denvergov.org.
  15. Colorado Department of Transportation. Colorado Boulevard Bus Rapid Transit Final Alternatives Survey. codot.gov/projects/studies/denvermetrobrt/coloradoblvd/alternative-survey. Accessed 2026-05-12.
  16. Institute for Transportation and Development Policy. The BRT Standard. 2024 edition. itdp.org.
  17. Levinson, H., Zimmerman, S., Clinger, J., Rutherford, S., Smith, R. L., Cracknell, J., & Soberman, R. (2003). TCRP Report 90: Bus Rapid Transit, Volumes 1–2. Transportation Research Board.
  18. National Association of City Transportation Officials (2016). Transit Street Design Guide. Island Press. Center Transitway and Offset Bus Lanes chapters.
  19. Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (2013). More Development for Your Transit Dollar: An Analysis of 21 North American Transit Corridors. Includes Cleveland HealthLine performance data.
  20. Diaz, R., & Hinebaugh, D. (2009). Characteristics of Bus Rapid Transit for Decision-Making (CBRT). Federal Transit Administration, U.S. DOT.
  21. Duranton, G., & Turner, M. A. (2011). "The Fundamental Law of Road Congestion: Evidence from US Cities." American Economic Review 101(6), 2616–2652. Adding road capacity generates roughly proportional new driving.
  22. Cairns, S., Hass-Klau, C., & Goodwin, P. (1998). Traffic Impact of Highway Capacity Reductions: Assessment of the Evidence. London: Landor Publishing. Reviews ~70 international cases of urban road capacity reduction; average ~25% reduction in traffic on affected corridors with limited displacement.
  23. Litman, T. (Victoria Transport Policy Institute, ongoing). Generated Traffic and Induced Travel: Implications for Transport Planning. vtpi.org/gentraf.pdf.