When Denver resident Jana Angelo rides the Regional Transportation District’s buses and trains, she feels trapped and says she sometimes hugs herself for fortitude.

She’s smelled fumes from passengers smoking fentanyl. She’s heard unhinged riders’ rants. Two “really high” men once fought right in front of her, said Angelo, 29.

“I was like, ‘Stop the bus!’ ” she said. “But the driver did not.”

Angelo packs a knife just in case, she said, and wears headphones, avoiding conversation.

She and her husband also share their locations as they ride to and from their apartment near Union Station, a transit-oriented area where parking difficulties complicate driving. A recent station evacuation piqued her fears. Trouble on RTD buses and trains can escalate in a flash, she said, waiting recently at a south metro station.

“You freeze up,” she said. “You want to get out. But you can’t get out.”

The public transit perils Angelo faces are becoming common in metro Denver and for city dwellers across the U.S. as riders who lack other mobility options grapple with volatility and violence spilling into spaces that once were safer.

Passengers on RTD’s buses and trains were assaulted or threatened at the rate of one per day over the last three years, according to agency records obtained by The Denver Post. RTD drivers also are assaulted regularly — more than 100 times a year on average since 2019, records show — as they work amid crime and antisocial behavior, including riders using illegal drugs and unhoused people who sleep in station elevators and on climate-controlled buses and trains.

The violence has spurred RTD’s directors to double the district’s police force, ramp up armed patrols and install protective barriers between drivers and passengers.

The agency’s general manager, Debra Johnson, acknowledged the problems and said ensuring safety is critical. She’sdiscussed rising violence and crime in public transit with her counterparts in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.

“We’re all adversely impacted by the same elements of society,” Johnson said in an interview, referring to mental health problems, substance use and homelessness. “These are societal issues. Whatever’s happening in a municipality is going to spill over into the transit system. What are we collectively doing to help minimize and mitigate these societal issues?”

State lawmakers should consider stricter penalties for unruly behavior on public transit, Johnson said. Assaults and abuse of RTD drivers could be treated as special crimes similar to assaults on police officers.

RTD employees deserve “an optimal working environment,” she said. “It plagues me as the CEO of a major transit agency that I cannot guarantee that for all my employees.”

Bus driver caught in armed conflict

RTD bus driver Dan Day, 43, recalled how, on a cold day in 2020 during his first year on the job, he saw a man down, bleeding from his head, while another man kicked him at the Decatur Station along Federal Boulevard.

Day took the bleeding man onto the bus and handed him paper towels. As he steered the bus around the station, the attacker approached it, pointing a gun. He climbed on, aiming the barrel at the bleeding man. Day was caught between them, learned it was a dispute about a sister, and brokered a truce.

“I had a sense he wouldn’t shoot,” Day said. “…I was just trying to follow procedure, to call dispatch, let them know what happened.”

RTD supervisors offered him therapeutic counseling. He declined, turning instead to classic stoic philosophers: “My own tools to just cope with scary and difficult situations,” Day said. “Keep yourself in the moment. This is just a moment in time. It is going to pass.”

The violence on public buses and trains has persisted even as RTD officials hire more police to work across the transit district, which serves eight counties, including all of Denver, Boulder, Broomfield and Jefferson counties, as well as parts of Adams, Arapahoe and Douglas counties and a small segment of Weld County.

It’s a factor in RTD’s struggle to reduce driver shortages, which hurt agency efforts to improve service. RTD’s ridership — 65 million people last year — lags a third below the district’s pre-pandemic level in 2019. As Colorado leaders plan to re-organize Front Range housing around public transit, the violence also looms as an obstacle to the state’s goal of enabling car-free living.

Proliferating perils

RTD bus drivers and train operators were physically assaulted 463 times between January 2019 and April 2024 — a rate of roughly seven assaults per month, according to the records obtained by The Post through a Colorado Open Records Act request.

In addition, drivers have reported 501 verbal assaults and threats of violence since 2021 — a dozen per month on average, the records show.

Assaults and threats targeting RTD passengers happen more often, according to the records. Since January 2021, 1,375 passengers have experienced physical assaults and verbal threats along bus and rail routes, records show. That’s an average of 34 a month over the past three years.

The troubles appear concentrated along busy streets including Colfax Avenue, Broadway and Federal Boulevard.

RTD’s transit police have been busy. The agency’s tallies show that, during the first half of 2023, transit officers made a monthly average of 36 arrests. They responded to a monthly average of 60 assaults, 486 disturbances, 1,206 drug-related incidents, 389 trespasses and 58 instances of vandalism, according to an agency document.

This year, a homicide on an RTD bus in west Denver heightened concerns. A 13-year-old boy has been charged with murder in the fatal shooting on Jan. 27 of a 60-year-old grandfather whose leg was blocking an RTD bus aisle.

Illegal drug use happens almost daily, drivers and train operators say.

Bus driver Eric Johnson pulls over when he detects fumes and asks the user to get off, he said while taking a break along Broadway recently. Once he was exposed to fumes and felt bad, Johnson said. Supervisors directed him to hospital treatment.

“You can get as high as they are from the second-hand smoke,” he said.

Over the past five years, RTD bus drivers and train operators filed 1,780 claims for compensation for harm they endured on their routes. This year, 94 of the 151 claims filed between January and April — 62% — followed incidents where drivers or train operators reported “inhalation of dust, gases, fumes, vapors,” an analysis of RTD data shows.

Light rail operator Roy Martinez, who previously worked as a bus driver and endured assaults, said he regularly smells illegal drugs on light-rail trains such as the E Line that connects downtown Denver with the south suburbs.

Typically, a rider places a fentanyl pill on a piece of foil and crushes it. Then the rider lights the powder and, hunkering under a hood or blanket, inhales the fumes.

Those fumes rise and spread through the train’s air system, Martinez said, noting he detects odors inside the locked front cabin where he runs the train. There’s no option but to push through to the next stop. “Then you stop the train, open the doors, air it out,” he said.

“If you ask me, in the future, we’re gonna have to bite the bullet and close off RTD stations” to enable tighter security screening, Martinez said.

RTD directors say safety will be a priority.

The number of assaults on bus drivers and train operators is “a very sobering statistic,”said RTD director Doug Tisdale, who also serves on the board of the American Public Transportation Association, in an emailed response to queries.

The violence “has the compounded effect of deterring customers from using our buses and trains,” he said.

Public transit in cities around the country is similarly hard hit.

Transit customer assaults nationwide numbered 14,375 between 2008 and 2022, leading to 10,430 injuries and 250 fatalities, according to Federal Transit Administration data. And “major assaults” on transit workers — those requiring hospitalization — around the nation have increased from 374 in 2018 to 656 in 2023, the federal data shows.

More policing, protective barriers

RTD directors have ordered a doubling of their transit police force, aiming for 119 officers by the end of the year. The police will cover the agency’s service area spanning 2,342 square miles, one of the largest in the nation.

“I have no doubt that an increase in the size of the RTD Transit Police Department will help to address this,” Tisdale said.

“Even though we will not have enough officers for some period of time to be on all buses and trains,” he said, riders will notice. “If you see an officer on an RTD vehicle from time to time, but not necessarily all the time, you take a gamble that there may be one on board when you wish to do something negative and thus will be less likely to try it.”

An RTD Transit Watch app, pitched as assurance that “you never ride alone,” helps riders notify police.

Barriers separating passengers from drivers also will be installed, strong enough to withstand blunt force. Fred Worthen, RTD’s assistant general manager for bus operations, said 60% of that work is done.

An RTD pilot project launched this year is tightening security in some stations where drug users and unhoused people have taken over elevators. Elevator doors have been re-programmed to stay open when not in use.

Conflict de-escalation training is mandatory.Driver assaults typically happen after disputes over paying fares, which currently provide less than 5% of the RTD’s annual budget of nearly $1 billion.

“We say. ‘Ask once. Then move on,’ ” Worthen said. “If somebody declines to pay a fare or they just don’t pay it, move on. If they are a habitual offender, we ask drivers to write it down. If I stop the bus to try to collect a $2 fare, there may be 40 other people on board that are late.”

RTD protocol says drivers should stay in their seats. But as difficult situations arise, drivers mull what to do.

Along his West Colfax Avenue route, Day considers himself “really good at keeping things chill,” drawing on the de-escalation training.

Once when two men were starting to fight, a woman in a wheelchair tried to escape by asking to get off, followed by her son, he said. Day lowered the ramp for the wheelchair, just as one of the fighters turned and targeted the son. The son punched him, knocking him to the floor of the bus. Day called an ambulance.

Deadly possibilities have emerged, he said, pointing to an incident in Charlotte, North Carolina, where a bus driver violated agency rules by carrying a gun and became involved in a shootout. Day said he’d never consider a gun.

“If I do feel unsafe, I’ll just get off the bus and run,” he said. “Your job or your life.”

Public transit rider safety concerns

RTD riders, too, are playing out scenarios.

The best practice for enduring rants or unwanted attention is conflict avoidance, Metropolitan State University of Denver student Genesis Perez, 28, said as she boarded a bus downtown by Broadway.

“If they start getting on me, I just stay silent,” she said.

For Sandra Montano, 45, a surgical technician, the changing climate has prompted her to ride with her daughter Kassandra, 17, who sat beside her on a recent morning as they headed downtown for a graduation celebration.

“I won’t let her go alone,” Montano said.

Men stare. “And it terrified me one day when I saw homeless men fighting,” Kassandra said. “I won’t ride if I don’t have to.”

A survey conducted for RTD in April found that 33% of metro Denver voters had an “unfavorable” view of the agency, up from 21% in 2009 and 16% in 2007. Voters cited “safety concerns” as their top problem and also raised concerns about “drug use on buses and trains” and homeless people.

“You do have to be aware of your surroundings,” said Solomon Joshua, 30, who’sbeen riding public transit all his life. He watched transit police remove a homeless man sleeping on a bus during a frigid day while others on the bus were using drugs, he said. “The police should be focused on the safety of everyone.”

Riding home after his shift at Denver International Airport, United Airlines employee Datus Jessup, 58, a longtime transit rider, lamented a sharp deterioration.

“It’s not too safe. We have a lot of drug action,” he said, in addition to unruly riders. “They get aggressive.”

The violence “interferes with the bus driver doing his job. And it interferes with the people on the bus,” Jessup said. “I’ve been frustrated at times because it interferes with me getting to work on time.”

Pharmacy store shift leader Andy Derrickson, 19, confined to a wheelchair due to a neurological condition, said he relies heavily on RTD every day for 40-minute bus-and-train commutes to work.

“I really want RTD to strive to get better,” Derrickson said.

He saw a fight that started on a street and spilled into a bus. One man hit another.

While he hasn’t felt unsafe, he said, he’s often uncomfortable.

“I wouldn’t want my sister to go alone on an RTD bus or train,” Derrickson said. “There’ve been weird people. We have tried not to take public transportation.”

One evening two years ago, before he needed the wheelchair, Derrickson said two men targeted him, buffeting him with comments “meant with malicious intent.”

“They were spewing Bible verses at me,” he said. “I thought, ‘I just hope they get off before I do.’ ”

But they didn’t. Derrickson moved to the other side of the train, trying to avoid them, he said. “They were blocking the door.”

Finally, he said, he pushed past them with difficulty.

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