Riding Public Transit in Denver: A Local’s Outsider Experience

An Outsider

It’s a funny thing, being a tourist, or at least a transient, in your home city. Sitting at Union Station at 2:00 PM on a Monday afternoon, I sipped a beetroot cocktail concocted by a properly bearded local mixologist with ample time on his hands to show off his crafting abilities given I was the only one in the place save an older gentleman sipping on a Gewürztraminer on the opposite side of the bright and airy bar in the train station. I’d wanted to sit on the terrace outside on this sunny summer day given my newly acquired proclivity to the European method of enjoying an afternoon cocktail, but at this time of day it was closed and so I was forced to sit inside.

The old man and the bartender exchanged pleasantries about the wine, and joked about how only good things must come out of Germany, which outside of a few unfortunate World Wars is a sentiment that I’m mostly in agreement with.

The Cross Town Trek

Home based on the very far south end of the Denver area during our visit, I decided to take on the challenge of reaching my final destination, a good 40 miles away on the west side of town, using nothing but the public transit system. Partly because I wanted to experience how an infrastructure challenged place like the USA’s mass transit system compared to the much lauded system of Europe, and also because an Uber to my destination was $60, I did not have a car, and I’m cheap.

The beetroot sour was nice and earthy, just as the mixologist had prescribed, and as I finished it I watched into the open kitchen as the staff at Mercantile prepped for the evening dinner crowd: peeling carrots and placing them in plastic bins, uncorking bottles of various oils and balsamics, it was all a lovely and energetic scene to watch, but I also thought how nice it would have been to be on the terrace.

Life Back Home

The journey so far had been mostly successful with respect to my self imposed objective. By mostly, I mean that I had cheated early on by having Jenn drop me off at the Centennial Airport where I had some business to attend and thereafter avoiding a one hour walk by taking an Uber to the nearest light rail station. I suppose I was not being a strict purist in my mission on this unseasonably hot Denver day and I looking like a tourist with a backpack full of books and a bottle of Swiss absinthe I had brought over for a friend. So I’d crept about 10 miles closer to my destination without yet touching the transit system because the sheer convenience was unavoidable.

In Amsterdam, borne not out of altruism but sheer necessity, we’ve become frequent users of the public transport system and bike travel. They’ve become a part of life just as much as a refrigerator or a washing machine in terms of modern conveniences. Often times, a short trip involves a bike and a bus and a train all in the span of a hour. This is not a novelty, it’s routine. I admit, one year into living there we succumbed to our American sensibilities and leased a car, unable to pass up the convenience of using it for short jaunts into the less connected Dutch countryside on the weekends with the kids. But no love was lost with the thing when I dropped it off for good back at the dealership before our trip back to the USA. So to practice this same endeavor in the USA in a city with a suburban sprawl like Denver seemed a fun or at least enlightening journey.

The Journey Begins

On the light rail up to Union Station, where I needed to transfer and join the westward spoke of this journey, the mostly empty train zoomed past the traffic on I-25, myself and the four other travelers passing time by looking at our phones and staring out the windows as the increasingly urban landscape rushed by. It was a peaceful and even enjoyable ride, the train clean and timely, the overhead announcements clear and concise and in a language that I spoke well. There was no jockeying for position as there always seems to be on the crowded Dutch trains. No fighting to get to the doors with two kids before they closed as the train darted its way from stop to stop across town.

Union Station harkens back to a time before we’d began our love affair with automobiles. Built in 1881, it connected Denver to the transcontinental railroad, offering passengers the chance to travel from Omaha to San Francisco in an unheard of 4 – 5 days. It signaled a forward looking era in which the nation would be connected like bicycle spokes in every corner, allowing travelers in comfortable staterooms to watch the American countryside drift by as they sipped their coffees and smoked cigars. Nowadays, the station offers only one option for interstate rail traffic: an Amtrak that runs from Chicago to San Francisco, tracing mostly the same route as the original transcontinental railroad did when completed 150 years before. What progress.

Heading west on the next leg of my journey was more of the same, with the exception of a fare checker making rounds in the train which resulted in an unfortunate gentleman nearby my seat being booted off the train. Other than that, the ride was very uneventful. I exited as close as the train would take me to my destination at a vast but mostly empty parking lot at the light rail stop. The final leg was to be either a very long walk, a quick bike or scooter ride using an app which I frantically downloaded on the train, or a bus ride which would drop me off in yet another parking lot which I’d weave across on foot to my final destination.

The bus system turned out to be surprisingly easy to navigate, Google maps telling me exactly where and when to catch it, and to my delight when I boarded, I was the only one on it…. So I was privately chauffeured to my final destination on a bus designed to hold 40 or 50 passengers. So much for being environmentally conscious. As I walked through a Target parking lot in front of the mall were I was headed, I was quite proud that I’d managed to spend only $5.50 and make it clear across town on (mostly) trains and buses, and decided I’d use that $54.50 I’d saved to buy at least one cocktail at the Yard House to celebrate my accomplishment.

I couldn’t help but notice how underutilized the whole system was. Granted, Denver is not known for having a top notch public transit system even relative to some other American cities, but it seemed a waste and a shame that this resource was out there for anyone to use, yet almost everyone preferred the convenience of a car even at the cost of fighting the gridlock along the perpetually trafficky I-25 and I-70 corridors (the beltway around town on the other hand has recently seen some reduction in congestion after a $275M widening project, which will buy the city maybe another decade or two before we have to do it again or find another solution).

Reflections on Home

When people ask me what I miss about living in the USA, I almost always point to the convenience that life in America offers around every turn (besides family and friends of course, don’t worry mom) that Europe does not: that large and free Target parking lot actually designed to accommodate the amount of cars needed for its customers, the public bathrooms that don’t require you to scramble for a Euro in your pocket to use, that ability to charge whatever you want to your credit card and worry about the consequences later.

It’s a beautiful thing, to load up your trunk at Costco with things you mostly don’t need and that you officially haven’t even paid for yet, and bring them home to your suburban white picketed fenced home and stick them in your oversized refrigerator and know you don’t have to repeat the process for another few weeks unless you want to just for fun.

The quickness and convenience is very difficult to part from – but I often wonder in our search for convenience have we headed down an endless and perhaps irreversible path to our own destruction? A perpetually debt ridden society where it’s totally acceptable if not encouraged to live beyond your means (a recent survey reported that nearly 70% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and almost a third have recently maxed out a credit card)? An infrastructure system which doesn’t seek to lessen our dependence on cars, but vainly attempts to constantly expand and accommodate our ever growing need and thirst for them?

Don’t get me wrong, I am far from an America hater. I could just as easily write a lengthy tirade of what I find wrong with the European way of life that would leave me fuming for the rest of the night. Just tonight, I read of how Amsterdam is spending €100,000 to install tiny stairs in the canals for cats to enable unfortunate felines who slipped in the water to escape more quickly. If there were ever something that shouted the need for some reasonable middle ground, this was it. In the land of American rugged individualism, the government wouldn’t give a second thought to helping a human falling into a canal, and yet here they are in Amsterdam doing it for cats.

Admitting Defeat

In the end, that thirst for convenience finally won, and on the way home, I opted for an Uber rather than repeat the whole exercise at 11:00 PM. I suppose my exhaustion and the late hour got the better of me, but on the ride home I couldn’t help but think just how large and sprawling a city Denver was, and how to compare it to Amsterdam as a place to quickly skate from this train stop to that and hop on your bike home was just not fair. They are in many ways totally different cities, but ultimately the difference to me was not that it took longer or was more inconvenient, it’s just that no one seems to care. That we collectively as a society have accepted it all. That we should all be fine with waiting in traffic for 1 hour to go ten miles because that’s just the way things are and will always be.

Hopefully there’s a better way that we’ll find, and maybe it’s fatalistic to say we’re on some path to destruction. But I can’t help but think this notion of American exceptionalism that’s been driven into us as kids has infected us with the belief that we can do no wrong and to suggest that others do things better is somehow anti-American. I hope one day in the not so distant future as I sip my morning espresso along a canal in Amsterdam (that I biked to, obviously) that I read in some newsreel that we’re trying new solutions in the USA other than widening another highway or adding another toll lane; but I also hope that at the time of reading this good news I’m not witnessing a wet cat climbing up some little set of cute cat stairs after its morning swim, happy not to have to strained its paws by climbing out on its own like those poor ruggedly individualistic American cats.