December 21, 2008 12:48 AM

Gotta Love the Route 15

If you're a rider of the Route 15, RTD's East Colfax bus, you know how busy it is, but have you ever seen the numbers? Now imagine if everyone on board paid to ride.

The 15 is the workhorse of RTD's bus service. Some drivers love it, some hate it. It's a real cross-section of humanity. Daily commuters from professionals to minimum-wage earners. Transit-dependent folks with no other way to get around town. The sober and not-so-sober. Fare payers and scofflaws who board the bus and don't drop money in the box.

It's those scofflaws that have RTD hiring off-duty Denver Police officers to ride random trips on the 15 and watch for people free-riding. Drivers complain to me pretty regularly that an increasing number of riders get on and refuse to pay. RTD policy tells drivers to avoid confrontations, let them ride, not delay the bus, and radio dispatch. Most often, security can't respond in time to do anything about it.

So RTD has hired off-duty Denver cops to ride in plainclothes near the driver to bust the non-payers. They also ride the Route 16 West Colfax and the Route 30 on South Federal Boulevard. We're waiting for the first reports from this crackdown.

Even so, the 15 is the transit agency's most productive and least subsidized service - by far.

Combined with the Route 15 Limited, which covers the same basic ground but does it a bit faster because it skips a lot of the local stops, try 6.62 million riders through all of 2007. That's one-fourth of all RTD riders coming in and out of downtown Denver on the local buses. It was in service 106,501 total hours last year, substantially higher than the second-place route in terms of riders and hours, the Zero bus that runs on Broadway. The "0" logged 70,386 hours of service and 2.66 million riders.

More importantly from the taxpayer's standpoint, you subsidize the Route 15 the least of all bus routes. It costs you $1.23 per rider because it's so heavily used. By contrast, the most heavily subsidized bus route is the Route CC serving Coal Creek Canyon to northwest Arvada. That costs you $42.95 per rider

The Route 15 runs 24 hours a day. The last westbound trip of the day starts out at Billings Street in Aurora at 3:05 a.m. The first trip of the new day starts at 46 minutes after that. Eastbound from Larimer Street, the day's last trip leaves at 4:12 a.m. while the new day's first trip leaves 26 minutes later.

There is never a time of day when there's not a 15 bus plying some part of Colfax.

Posted by Kevin Flynn at 12:48 AM | Comments (0)