RTD has spent the bet­ter part of a decade launch­ing new train lines across the metro area as the sprawl­ing tran­sit agency aims to ful­fill the promise it made near­ly 16 years ago, when vot­ers approved the multi­bil­lion-dol­lar Fas­Tracks and its promised 120-plus miles of rail.

On Mon­day, the Region­al Trans­porta­tion Dis­trict will open what will like­ly be — at least for the fore­see­able future — the last major rail cor­ri­dor in its 2,342-square-mile ser­vice area. But the debut of the N‑Line to the city’s north­ern sub­urbs will be like no oth­er open­ing RTD has held before, with the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic hav­ing gut­ted tran­sit ridership.

The 13-mile com­muter rail line con­nect­ing Union Sta­tion to Com­merce City, North­glenn and Thorn­ton is one of the only major tran­sit projects any­where to go oper­a­tional in the midst of a glob­al health cri­sis, and its launch next week rais­es fresh ques­tions about what the future of pub­lic trans­porta­tion will look like once the coro­n­avirus fades into memory.

In Col­orado alone, the pan­dem­ic has sunk RTD’s rid­er­ship a whop­ping 64.4% dur­ing the sec­ond quar­ter of 2020 as com­pared to the same peri­od the year before, accord­ing to Amer­i­can Pub­lic Trans­porta­tion Asso­ci­a­tion data. RTD projects a bud­get short­fall of $215 mil­lion next year as a result of the eco­nom­ic dis­rup­tion, and the agency is con­tem­plat­ing the pos­si­ble elim­i­na­tion of more than 500 jobs.

But out­go­ing Inter­im Gen­er­al Man­ag­er Paul Bal­lard not­ed The Den­ver Post that the N‑Line has been on the draw­ing board for more than a decade, with con­struc­tion of the $832 mil­lion project hav­ing com­menced back in 2014. Pan­dem­ic or no pan­dem­ic, it needs to open now that the work is com­plete, he said.

“When you make that kind of invest­ment, you have to put it into oper­a­tion,” he said.

Still, COVID-19 is not mak­ing things easy for RTD’s lat­est rail launch. Because of the rid­er­ship plunge across the dis­trict that start­ed in March with the arrival of the virus, Bal­lard says the N‑Line will like­ly car­ry less than half of the pro­ject­ed 5,600 to 8,100 dai­ly rid­ers it was expect­ed to have at the end of its first year.

Already the agency has adjust­ed ser­vice fre­quen­cy on the N‑Line from every 20 min­utes, as orig­i­nal­ly planned, to every 30 min­utes. And RTD will reduce the num­ber of trains it uses in the cor­ri­dor from five to three.

But Bal­lard is con­fi­dent that the impacts of COVID-19 on transit’s future won’t be as dire or as long-last­ing as some are spec­u­lat­ing, even with the fun­da­men­tal changes the virus has wrought in work­ing habits across the coun­try. He called the N‑Line’s open­ing “one of the few bright spots” in an oth­er­wise awful year.

“This is going to be a blip,” he said of the pan­dem­ic. “I think peo­ple will come back to the office. Peo­ple will still want to com­mu­ni­cate face to face — or at least mask to mask.”

“Don’t pick on transit”

Experts con­tact­ed for this sto­ry said the tran­sit sec­tor has been through tri­als before, whether it’s com­pe­ti­tion with ride-shar­ing ser­vices Uber and Lyft or the advent of tele­work­ing more than a decade ago. Ram Pendyala, a pro­fes­sor of trans­porta­tion sys­tems at Ari­zona State Uni­ver­si­ty, said the indus­try will weath­er this chal­lenge, as well.

“As the pan­dem­ic fades — or we fig­ure out how to man­age it — things will get back to what­ev­er the new nor­mal might be, and I don’t think it’s going to be that much dif­fer­ent from the old nor­mal,” he said. “Tran­sit is still a very effec­tive way to car­ry a lot of peo­ple when there is a lot of traf­fic on the roads.”

While tech com­pa­nies like Google have announced extend­ed work-from-home arrange­ments for their employ­ees into 2021, Pendyala said that is off­set by firms try­ing to get back to stan­dard oper­at­ing pro­ce­dure. The Wall Street Jour­nal report­ed that JPMor­gan Chase ordered its trad­ing staff back to the office start­ing next week.

“There’s a lot of Amer­i­ca that is beyond Google, Face­book and Apple,” Pendyala said. “There’s no ques­tion that there’s a huge num­ber of work­ers — Wal­mart stock­ers, jan­i­tors and hourly staff — that need to get to work.”

Tran­sit, he said, has been get­ting a bad rap as news out­lets paint its cur­rent con­di­tion in grim terms, but oth­er parts of the econ­o­my — like con­cert venues, air­lines and the cruise indus­try — are in the same predicament.

“Tran­sit is not alone so don’t pick on tran­sit,” he said.

Art Guzzetti, vice pres­i­dent of pol­i­cy and mobil­i­ty with the Amer­i­can Pub­lic Trans­porta­tion Asso­ci­a­tion, also chal­lenged the idea that the coro­n­avirus has for­ev­er altered transit.

“To say tran­sit won’t come back is to say large pub­lic events won’t come back, that sports won’t come back,” said Guzzetti, who helped lead tran­sit agen­cies in Penn­syl­va­nia and New Jersey.

He said peo­ple are at their core social ani­mals, and shared work spaces, where employ­ees can gath­er and bounce ideas off one anoth­er, have thrived as a result. The pow­er of in-per­son col­lab­o­ra­tion won’t sim­ply melt away as a result of a glob­al pan­dem­ic, he said.

“There’s a rea­son cities have tall build­ings — they allow cre­ative peo­ple to con­nect with one anoth­er through com­merce,” Guzzetti said.

More track to lay

In the mean­time, RTD has to dig itself out of a bud­getary hole and deal with ser­vice lev­els that have been dras­ti­cal­ly cut since April. And it must do so at a time when it is turn­ing over pow­er at the high­est lev­el, wel­com­ing Debra John­son as the gen­er­al man­ag­er of the 51-year-old agency.

John­son, deputy CEO of Long Beach Tran­sit in Cal­i­for­nia for the last six years, is expect­ed to start at RTD in Novem­ber. And with her induc­tion will come famil­iar and lin­ger­ing com­plaints about RTD’s roll­out of FasTracks.

While the N‑Line is final­ly com­ing online after a two-year delay, a sim­i­lar train to Boul­der and Long­mont is still years away from becom­ing real­i­ty due to a bloat­ed price tag and dif­fi­cul­ties nego­ti­at­ing a track-shar­ing agree­ment with BNSF. Even the N‑Line itself isn’t com­plete — anoth­er 5.5‑mile seg­ment extend­ing fur­ther north is in the corridor’s blue­print but has no fund­ing to proceed.

Still, Thorn­ton May­or Jan Kul­mann is hap­py to have the por­tion that is open­ing next week. On Thurs­day, Kul­mann took a ride on the new line dur­ing a media pre­view of the ser­vice, which fea­tures a 29-minute jour­ney to Union Sta­tion with six sta­tions and Colorado’s longest bridge.

She said it will take traf­fic off of over­taxed Inter­state 25 and pro­vide a direct link for city res­i­dents and visitors.

“I think it will help revi­tal­ize Thorn­ton,” Kul­mann said. “We have an oppor­tu­ni­ty now to bring peo­ple to Thorn­ton and see what we have to offer.”

It will be the first rail line in RTD’s sys­tem to charge the same $3 fare at any sta­tion — a pilot pro­gram it is rolling out for the first six months — as opposed to using a tiered approach that costs pas­sen­gers more the longer they ride. Kul­mann called tran­sit an “equal­iz­er” for those who can’t afford a car or can’t pay for rides by taxi or Uber.

“I think the vot­ers are going to be very hap­py about this,” she said.

IF YOU GO

What: The launch of N‑Line service

When: 10 a.m. Mon­day; pas­sen­ger board­ing begins in-per­son at noon

Where: On the N‑Line YouTube page

Cost: Free through Sept. 27; $3 thereafter