How many people (and how much did it cost) rode the ski train this past winter? The Bustang Outrider Sterling to Denver Line. CPR's Warner treats Polis different from other Democrats.
How many people (and how much did it cost) rode the ski train this past winter?
The 2024 legislative session saw a bill pass (SB24-184, linked first below) that put a $3 DAILY fee on every rental car and moving truck in Colorado. This brings the total rental car fee Colorado charges to $5.23 per day.
The revenue goes to the Colorado Transportation Investment Office, a state enterprise, and would, quoting the bill's fiscal note, "...go toward completing, operating, and maintaining multimodal surfacetransportation infrastructure projects." One such project was subsidized (a 40% reduction in ticket prices) and expanded service on the Winter Park Ski Train.
Back in November last year, I saw a press release about this new expanded service. It's linked second below. It made me wonder about the increase in ridership and cost now that we taxpayers (oops! fee-payers*) are subsidizing it.
Been a long time getting here, both waiting for the end of the ski season and also for an answer from CDOT and Amtrak. But I have an answer.
The ridership information from CDOT is in the screenshot labeled "Amtrak" (that was the source of the table, but it matches the information I got from CDOT). Clearly a significant jump this last ski season compared to both before and also for pre-COVID years. It is, in fact, a 153% increase over the previous ski season.
By way of comparison, I returned to the press release to note a couple things. First, the subsidized ski train runs more often, 69 ski trips vs. 40 the previous year--a 72.5% increase. The train also makes more stops: Winter Park with new addition Fraser, eventually adding Granby, Steamboat Springs, and Craig. I was not able to get any numbers to share on how many went to Fraser, the new stop, as opposed to Winter Park the historic one.
A CDOT spokesperson told me that trains have been running an average of 89% full and as high as 96%, and that this was achieved without any paid advertising of the expanded service (apparently some are using it to commute from Fraser to Denver).
The cost to Colorado's moving van and car renters has been a total of $1.2 million.
What about the benefit for us fee payers? That's harder to quantize, but I can maybe give a bit of a hint. The third link below is a CDOT site offering Eisenhower tunnel counts for 2025. Screenshot 1 is from this page and offers some traffic statistics for cars passing through the tunnel.
Let's use the value from January 2025, the average daily total cars of 34,652. If you go back to the train ridership data and take the total number of people riding the ski train and divide it by the total number of trips, you get 43919/69 = 637 people per trip in this last ski season. Doing the same for the previous ski season (train passengers vs. trips), you get 17355/40 = 434 people per trip.
So, the expanded service, the lower ticket prices (paid by you) meant an increase of 637 - 434 = 203 extra riders on the train.
This is about half a percent (0.6%) of the number of people going through Eisenhower daily. And, at least by comparing daily averages, not a substantial decrease in car trips on I-70 compared to January 2024--see screenshot 2 from the same CDOT page.
Coming at it from another direction, if I take the $1.2 million Coloradans paid in fees and divide it by the 26564 extra passengers, I get about $45 per new passenger.
Now that's something you can remind yourself of when you pay that extra $6 to rent a U-Haul in Alamosa. Remember that your money (coupled with many others) helped the state pay $45 a head so someone could take a train to ski. That extra money enticed maybe 200 or so more people a day** to ride the train, probably making an inconsequential dent in I-70 traffic.
You can't argue with success like that!
*One of the arguments made by the State Supreme Court that justified their ruling that fees are not taxes is that fees supposedly only charge the beneficiary of a service. What if you rent a car but don't ski? Well, your benefit is the supposedly clearer roads and cleaner air friend. Wonder whether or not you'll see this benefit, especially if you live far from the Denver Metro? I do too.
**Couple caveats here. Not everyone riding the ski train would have stayed on I-70 through the tunnel. Nor can we say that everyone riding the train would have equated to one more car. There are obviously families riding and there are undoubtedly some (though perhaps not a large amount) who chose to ski because they didn't have to drive I-70. As it stands, this "back of the envelope" calculation is within an order of magnitude at least.
https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/sb24-184
https://www.codot.gov/travel/ejmt/trafficcounts
The Bustang Outrider Sterling to Denver Line
One last collection of numbers from CDOT: I noticed a bit back (I told you in the previous post that CDOT is slow to get you info) that there is a Bustang/Outrider bus service running from Sterling to Denver.
If you want to see the stops, check out the first link below (or the image at the head of this post which comes from that page).
I asked the same CDOT spokesperson for some numbers on this route and got the following (quoting from my email):
As for the Bustang Denver-to-Sterling line:
In 2023, there were 176 riders for service from April through December that year (including trips both ways on the line) for service that ran only Monday, Wednesday and Friday. A stop at DIA was not added until October of that year, so ridership did not start to increase until late in the year.
In 2024, there were 658 riders for a full year of service that included Monday through Friday service to DIA, which greatly enhanced ridership.
And in 2025, through March there have been 258 riders so far, which doesn't sound like much but is on track to nearly double ridership from the previous year, again likely owing to the five-day-a-week DIA service. It can take several seasons to sufficiently grow ridership, but as word-of-mouth spreads and as service stays consistent or even gets better, ridership will grow.
As for cost, as with all Bustang routes, CDOT pays private vendors to operate the Denver-to-Sterling line. The contract is for $300,000, but that figure also includes the cost of the contractor operating a Sterling-to-Greeley line, which has significantly less ridership. Though I did try, I could not get a figure separating out the costs for those two routes. So, there are likely shared costs for fuel, staffing and maintenance. It was not possible to say one route costs X amount while the other costs Y amount. It's all lumped in together. So, any cost-per-passenger figure would be skewed.
Do please note that last couple sentences. You should take the cost above with a grain of salt. They include more than one route.
Nonetheless, let's fix an approximate per rider price. If we take the CDOT spokespersons contention that 258 riders in the first quarter of 2025 means that we'd have about 1032 riders a year, we end up with $291 cost per rider. The fare is (if you're not over 65, a teen, or disabled) $22 to go from Union State in Denver to Sterling. That would make the net cost to Coloradans $269.
By way of comparison, I looked up Greyhound's bus line running down I-76. I wasn't able to find a fare from Denver to Sterling,** but I found one to Brush. The fare for that trip is $38.64, but of course doesn't cost taxpayers.
I was not able to find any meaningful traffic data to share about how many people drive on I-76 (like the approximate mountain trips in the post prior to this one). The closest I could find was an old CDOT site listing truck flows on 76 near Sterling from 2019. There is therefore nothing (even approximate) we could say about a change in traffic along I-76.
Is it just me, or do you note a pattern here: when the government subsidizes and runs transportation, it's pretty damn costly.
**There had been for some time a Greyhound service running Omaha to Denver that runs along I-76. As of my last check in writing this, they now only stop at Brush.
https://ridebustang.com/outrider/?section=routesmap#sterling_denver
CPR's Warner treats Polis different from other Democrats.
Just to show you that it isn't always just Republicans who get different treatment from lefty media, I wanted to share a couple of interviews by CPR's Ryan Warner.
I have written in the past that one way to find media bias, media injecting their perspectives into news, is to read the same story across outlets. Just like you might listen to the same song done by different artists to get a sense of one particular artist's style.
There's also something to be said for watching how the same outlet, reporter, what have you treats different stories or subjects. That's what I have for you today.
The two links below are for interviews done by CPR's Ryan Warner. The first is a sitdown that AG Phil Weiser had and the second is Gov Polis' turn.
Read or listen to both and you'll get the clear sense I did: Warner does not let Polis get away with anywhere near the amount of political puffery that he does for Weiser. He lets both get away with more than he would from a Republican, obviously, but there is clearly disparate treatment going on here.
My speculation is (and this is pure speculation) that Warner like many progressive reporters (Kyle Clark, I'm looking in your direction right now) doesn't like Polis. Many progressives don't.
I am loathe to make too many sweeping grand statements about the world, but I can't help but wonder about how Warner's treatment of Polis** here might be an indication of a schism between progressives and traditional Democrats in this state.
And then my mind goes to wondering about how conservatives could capitalize on that. We're a little ways away from that happening though. In the meantime, if you are a conservative and/or Republican and wanting to help bring this state back to sanity, get involved.
We will have to relearn how to walk before we run and there's much to do.
If ideas of what to do would help, let me know. I can connect you to people and offer ideas.
**As an added bit of context, I can tell you as someone who watches lots of media that this isn't the only time Warner has gnawed on Polis. It surprises me that Polis continues to go on CPR given Warner's repeated treatment.
https://www.cpr.org/2025/05/14/interview-ag-phil-weiser-trump-lawsuits/
https://www.cpr.org/2025/05/22/polis-interview-house-budget-bill-colorado-impact-housing-lawsuit/