DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: The money train: Colorado’s Front Range rail a looming debacle.

Early this week, Colorado’s Front Range Passenger Rail District released its Plan for Colorado Connector – CoCo, the name it has given to a proposed passenger train between Fort Collins and Denver.

The plan calls for spending $332 million in phase 1 (three trains a day each way), $1.7 billion for phase 2 (extending trains to Pueblo), and $2.7 billion for phase 3 (increasing frequencies to up to 10 daily roundtrips).

My first thought is that, as someone who actually went to planning school for a year or so before becoming disillusioned by the profession, I resent it when government agencies call documents like this “plans.” A real plan considers a wide range of alternatives, carefully evaluates the benefits and costs of each alternative, and then, as a part of implementation, sets up targets and a monitoring process so that it can change or cancel the plan if it fails.

This document contains none of that. Instead, it simply proposes to spend a lot of money, after which it would spend a lot more money, and then spend even more money. No alternatives are considered and there is no suggestion that if the first step in the project fails in some way they will modify or abandon later steps.

In short, this is not a plan; it is a sales brochure designed to convince legislators and the public to pay for expensive train service that few people will use.

Democrats couldn’t figure out how justify California-style high-speed rail in Colorado, so we’ll get the smaller scale “CoCo” grift machine, instead.