A transit rider waiting for a bus rarely thinks about governance. Yet decisions about who plans transit service, controls funding, and sets priorities can shape nearly every aspect of the rider experience, from fares and route design to major capital investments.
Those responsibilities are organized differently across metropolitan areas. Some regions place them within a single regional agency, while others divide them among multiple providers, boards, and local governments. Comparing Denver’s comprehensive Regional Transportation District (RTD) to metro Atlanta’s multiple transit agencies shows what a single regional agency can achieve, where that structure creates challenges, and the trade-offs policymakers face when organizing transit systems and what other states’ experiences suggest about managing those trade-offs.
Denver represents one of the largest examples of a regional transit model. The RTD covers more than 3 million residents across the City and County of Denver and portions of Adams, Arapahoe, Boulder, Broomfield, Douglas, Jefferson, and Weld counties. The agency operates bus, light rail, commuter rail, and paratransit service throughout the region. Its 15-member elected board adopts budgets, sets fares, approves capital projects, and makes service decisions across the district.
Unlike Denver, transit service in metro Atlanta is provided by multiple agencies. The Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) is governed by a 13-member voting board appointed by participating jurisdictions and state officials, while other providers answer to county governments, separate boards, or state agencies. MARTA operates the region’s heavy rail system and a large bus network, but transit service is also provided by Ride Gwinnett, CobbLinc, Xpress, Connect Douglas, and other local operators.
The strongest argument for a single regional agency is its ability to plan transit as one network rather than as a collection of separate services. Through Reimagine RTD, a systemwide effort to redesign Denver’s bus and rail service, and its System Optimization Plan, which evaluates how transit resources are deployed across the district, RTD plans bus, rail, and paratransit service as a single agency. If travel patterns change, the agency can compare bus service, rail investments, station improvements, and paratransit improvements to determine which investment produces the greatest benefit.
Regionwide planning is more difficult in metro Atlanta because authority is divided among several governing bodies. A redesign comparable to Reimagine RTD would require multiple agencies to agree on priorities, funding, and implementation. While that structure preserves local control, it can make it more difficult to evaluate competing transit needs across the region and respond quickly when travel patterns shift. Some states have addressed this problem without consolidating transit agencies. For example, Virginia’s SMART SCALE program evaluates projects from different jurisdictions using a common performance framework rather than a single transit operator.
The ability to make systemwide changes quickly is not limited to service planning. In 2024, RTD’s board simplified the system’s fares in a single action, cutting prices and reducing the network to two zones. Metro Atlanta has no single body with the authority to do the same. A comparable change would require multiple agencies to agree on and implement the same fare policy.
The same challenge appears in budget planning. RTD primarily funds its system through one sales tax collected across its eight-county district. The board funds bus, rail, and paratransit services together in one budget. However, metro Atlanta has no comparable funding pool. MARTA’s sales tax is collected only in its member jurisdictions; Cobb County pays for CobbLinc, and Gwinnett funds Ride Gwinnett from its own revenue. A dollar raised in Gwinnett can add bus service there, but it cannot be redirected to a higher-priority project elsewhere in the region, even when the need is greater.
Planning, funding, and pricing transit through a single agency also centralize accountability. Because RTD makes the region’s major transit decisions, problems across the system are ultimately traced back to one governing board. Following the pandemic, ridership remained about 39% below pre-pandemic levels and continued to decline in early 2025. Fare revenue fell to only about one-third of its 2019 level after adjusting for inflation. Operator shortages reduced bus and rail reliability, and rail maintenance pushed light rail on-time performance down to 59.9% in August 2024 before it improved. Riders and frontline staff also continued to raise safety and security concerns. A 2024 state audit identified weaknesses in asset management, budgeting, and RTD’s implementation of earlier reforms. All of those operational, financial, and governance concerns raised broader questions about whether RTD’s governance structure provided sufficient accountability and oversight.
Those concerns led lawmakers to create the RTD Accountability Committee through Senate Bill 25-161 to review the agency’s governance, finances, service delivery, and long-term structure. Lawmakers later approved Senate Bill 26-150, which restructures RTD’s governing board beginning in 2029, shrinking it from 15 elected members to nine, five elected and four appointed by the governor. The reforms did not eliminate regional governance. Instead, they reflected an effort to strengthen oversight.
Metro Atlanta faced a different challenge. Since no single agency oversaw regional transit planning and investment, multiple jurisdictions had to work together to set priorities before any regional projects could begin. Rather than merging its transit operators into a single agency, Georgia established the Atlanta-region Transit Link Authority (ATL) in 2018 to coordinate regional planning. In 2026, the ATL and the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority were merged into the Georgia Transportation Efficiency Authority, which is managed by a new 13-member board.
Neither state abandoned its underlying governance model. Instead, each sought to address the limitations of the system it already had. Those experiences point to two recommendations for other metropolitan regions.
- Plan as one: Score competing projects through a common regional process. Denver shows the advantages of evaluating transit investments through one regional decision-making process. Regions with multiple providers do not need to consolidate transit agencies to achieve many of those same benefits. Virginia’s SMART SCALE program offers one model. A transit-focused version would score bus, rail, and paratransit projects across all providers using common performance measures, allowing limited funding to flow to the projects that deliver the greatest benefit per dollar spent regardless of which agency or jurisdiction sponsors them.
- Evaluate governance before problems force reform. Both Colorado and Georgia acted only after weaknesses in their existing governance structures became difficult to ignore. States should require periodic independent reviews tied to major planning cycles so governance problems can be identified earlier. Texas already does this through quadrennial audits of certain transit authorities.