Why I Work for RTD: Caitlin Magee

Caitlin Magee
Data Analyst II, Light Rail Operations (20 years)

“I am a person that is committed to lifelong learning, whether it's reading, traveling, listening, or activating my brain through learning. That is probably how I would define myself: I want to know the why of things, or how things work or how things make people feel or what people enjoy, why they enjoy it, what is it that brings joy to your life. One of the things that brings a lot of joy to my life is constant learning. What can I learn today that I didn't know yesterday? What can I explore? What can I experience? I'm very much about being present for life.

“I think my parents instilled a sense of adventure in me from a very early age. We lived in Africa when I was a baby for 9 months. My father was a professor of political science, and he was doing research over there. We traveled across Europe on the way back, and then my parents took us on trips. We drove a lot. I grew up in Michigan, and we were five hours from Chicago and five hours from Toronto, so we went to both places at least twice a year. My mother was very into art. If there was an exhibit, like the King Tut exhibit in the ’70s, we would make a special trip to Chicago for that.

“Both my parents traveled a lot. My mother went to China in the ’70s and Russia when it was still the Soviet Union. When I was 17, I went to Europe for six weeks to East Germany, to Czechoslovakia, which people didn't go to in 1985. I was learning about how other people live, what other people experience. And in that time, in all those adventures, it was always about how do you get around? How do you navigate yourself? How do you learn a city? We did that with public transportation. Taking subways, taking buses, has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember.

“My best friend from high school went to CU Boulder. I went to college in Ohio, and I came out to visit her once on a whim, and I just fell in love with the mountains, and fell in love with Boulder. I lived here between my junior and senior year of college. And 10 days after I graduated, in 1990, I moved out here, and I've been here ever since. Boulder reminded me so much of Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I grew up, except with the mountains. I didn't have a car when I first moved out here, so I got around either by bicycle or walking or riding the bus.

“I started at RTD in 2002, and I worked in what was then Public Affairs, now called Communications. I left RTD for two years and came back in 2005, and I worked in the Board Office for a number of years. I worked for administration, and then that department was eliminated. Luckily for me, I had been working on a certificate in IT at the University of Denver. So I got a job as a business analyst in the IT department. I was there for several years. And then one of the business support positions came up in Light Rail. I was looking for a change, and so I came over to Light Rail, and I've been here ever since.

“I have connections around the district. If I don't understand or know something, I know people to call, and I have a little bit of a different perspective. Working for the Board, I've seen things at a really high level. Working in IT gives you an overview of all our systems and how they work together. And then coming to Light Rail was a totally different world. I always rode the 32 bus because I lived in Northwest Denver, so I really didn't know a lot about the trains. It's given me a very well-rounded perspective of the agency.

“The agency has changed a lot. When I first started working at Blake Street, pretty much everybody was headquartered there, with the exception of the operating divisions. And now we've grown so much with the passage of FasTracks. One of my favorite things to do was to volunteer at the rail line openings and get out and learn the alignments and talk with customers.

“I wish people understood that decisions made about routes and services are not just what somebody randomly decided to do. A lot of factors go into where our routes are. We have to have the ridership to support them.

“People need a safe and efficient way to get to work. Servicing places of employment, places of education, is a real value to the community. I wish people understood how much it benefits a community to have a public transit system. Everybody knows how well they work in really big cities, but when you go to cities where transit is planned after, or maybe not along with growth, you have real problems, because then there aren't options.

“I'm a pretty avid hockey fan for the Detroit Red Wings. That's my diehard team; that’s my favorite sport to watch. I like connecting people and helping people out. What I’ve always wanted to do in my life is help people or work for an organization that helps people. It's always been a strong tenet of who I am.”