RTD sets higher ridership, reliability goals for CEO Debra Johnson

The Regional Transportation District in Denver passed a set of amendments on Tuesday night that will push CEO Debra Johnson to improve on-time transit and increase ridership.

The agency responsible for Metro Denver’s rail and bus services has been trying to regain its footing after the pandemic slashed ridership and internal disputes surfaced.

Public trust in the agency is also sinking, as demonstrated during the public comment portion of the meeting. People showed up in-person, online and through email to express their discontent with unpredictable wait times and unreliable customer service, and called out poor service on the E Line specifically, which runs southeast from downtown Denver to Lone Tree, and has been undergoing maintenance and safety checks since last summer.

“Just fix it,” a frustrated Paolo Solorzano, founder of the RTD Riders Alliance, said as his allotted speaking time ran out.

The board spent the evening toughening Johnson’s short-term performance goals, including boosting ridership and increasing on-time service, which are used at the end of the year to determine potential salary raises.

Getting back on track

The board amended three performance goals established at the end of last year, and added a fourth.

The first goal is to increase on-time performance of buses, light rail and commuter trains, bringing on-time service of buses to 83% from 80.5%, light rail to 83% from 80.1%, and to keep commuter rail performance at 96%.

The agency’s latest performance data shows that customer perception of “system reliability” is at about 55%, meaning about 55% of survey respondents feel that the buses and trains usually run on time. That percentage is up slightly from 50% in 2023 and 2022.

Johnson’s second short-term goal is to bring ridership up to nearly 69.6 million people between October 2024 and September 2025, up 5% from a baseline determined by past ridership and comparisons with “peer agencies” in San Diego, California, Salt Lake City, Utah, and Austin, Texas.

Johnson occasionally pushed the directors to clarify their reasoning for the amendments. She questioned considering San Diego a “peer agency” since the system doesn’t deal with harsh winters.

Other directors noted that the 5% number seemed to be pulled “out of thin air.” But Director Matt Larsen, who worked on the amendment, defended the increase while acknowledging the time pressures that the board was under.

“If we wanted to have a more ambitious goal, then we had to set a more ambitious goal …” said Larsen, who ran for the RTD board last year on a platform of shoring up safety concerns and holding management accountable. “It’s really unfortunate that this process ended up like it did, where I personally don’t have an understanding of why 3% is necessarily any better of a number than 5% or any other number, really. … What we wanted to do here was try to push things a little bit harder, and basically take the risk that we could be erring on the side of being too ambitious.”

The third goal is to improve perceptions of safety at stations and aboard transit services by 4 percentage points. The latest values show about 61% of riders feel safe on board, and only 54.7% feel safe waiting at stations.

A fourth short-term goal requires Johnson to identify four new initiatives to decrease traffic injuries and deaths by mid-October under the state’s Vision Zero program, which works to curb accidents on Colorado’s roadways.

A fifth goal to increase RTD revenue by addressing fare evasion was proposed but did not pass.

The board also shifted the weight of the metrics as a whole, so that the short-term goals will account for a greater percentage of Johnson’s next performance evaluation which determines Johnson’s salary. 

Johnson inherited a multitude of challenges when she was hired in August 2020 and clashed with senior staff, according to reporting by CPR. In December, the board extended her contract — which was set to expire in November 2025 — through May 2027, and approved a 5% raise, bringing her annual salary up to $421,878.

With the revisions in place, Johnson’s ability to meet the short-term goals will account for half of her performance evaluation, up from about one-third, with the other half determined by her ability to meet core job responsibilities and her “alignment” with RTD’s values. 

The CEO is evaluated annually, and receives a raise of 1-7% depending on how she scores in each of the three categories. 

Johnson, for the most part, agreed with the goals and amendments when asked to comment, and emphasized a willingness to cooperate with the directors’ decisions.

“I look at this as this is not just a performance measure for our general manager. This is a performance measure for us, for the board, for senior managers of RTD, and for all of the RTD employees that are out there,” Director Karen Benker said. “We’ve all joined RTD because we believe in transit. We’ve been watched closely by the governor, the state legislature, the press, they’re all watching us tonight to see if we’re going to set a little bit higher of a goal for ourselves.”