No car, no problem: How my Midwestern parents used RTD to navigate Denver

“This is so great, that was so easy!”, my dad shouted up to me as he and my mom ascended the stairs of the Louisiana/Pearl light rail station, “Zipping past all the traffic, we need this in Wisconsin!”

When I moved to Denver last year, the culture shock I experienced was not just towards the lack of humidity, or lack of mosquitos, but also the presence of robust public transit options. Growing up in Wisconsin and moving to Iowa for college, public transit was nearly non-existent, with only the Amtrak to Chicago, accessible at a stop in Milwaukee, or the city buses around Des Moines, Iowa’s capitol.

My parents are Midwesterners at heart, currently living in Pewaukee, Wisconsin, a suburb half an hour outside of Milwaukee. My mom grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and my dad in Pewaukee. Both areas have limited public transportation, so when I moved to Denver, the mountains weren’t the only thing catching their eye when they would visit.

This past weekend, I moved into a new apartment and asked my parents if they could fly the two hours from Madison to Denver to help. They said yes, but that they would not rent a car, deciding only to use RTD’s services to navigate the metro.

Relying on public transportation to get to their hotel in the Denver Tech Center, my parents found it incredibly easy to buy a day pass from the RTD kiosk at the airport upon their arrival, download the Next Ride app, and see the best way to get around. They took the A Line from Denver International Airport to Peoria Station, then transferred to the R Line to get to Belleview Station. Simple! And to visit me at my new apartment in Washington Park, they just hopped on the E Line and took it to the Louisiana/Pearl Station.

My dad, being the massive sports fanatic that he is, decided to head downtown on a Sunday to see the Rockies play (and surprisingly defeat!) the Chicago White Sox. Despite neither being his preferred team, he raved about the game afterwards, and the ease in getting there. “Taking the E Line [from Belleview to Union Station] was awesome. I paid less for a Rockies ticket and an RTD pass combined than I would have if I had paid for parking down there!”

“That’s what is so cool about Denver, you can get downtown in 15 minutes,” he added. “In Wisconsin, if I wanted to go see a [Milwaukee] Bucks game, that’d take at least 45 minutes in traffic, and I’d have to deal with parking. Imagine an eight-minute train ride to a Bucks game –I'd go crazy!”

Though the city of Milwaukee has a bus system similar to RTD’s 16th Street Free Ride in Denver, and has a stop for the Amtrak, there is no direct route from my parents’ house in Pewaukee to these public transit options except for driving. If they want to go anywhere, they have to drive.

“I was really happy and surprised to see how many people were on the light rail at the airport,” my mom observed when I met up with them for dinner the day they arrived, “I’m so used to driving that I figured everyone else would just rent cars here. But the light rail is great, it’s so fast! The whole line was full, with hikers and bikers and people excited to be in Colorado.” Next visit, Mom will be ready for a lesson in the difference between light rail and commuter rail.

Having lived in Denver for a year, and being an intern with RTD, it is easy for me to forget that public transportation options do not exist everywhere, or at the very least, not on the same scale as RTD. My parents were here for five days over the Fourth of July weekend, but nearly every time I was with them, all they could talk about was the importance of RTD and how they wished for something similar in Wisconsin.