Erica Pike typically stands at her bus stop on Lincoln Street just north of 1st Avenue a few times a week as part of her commute downtown.
And typically, it's a mess. One morning last month, trash overflowed from a small waste can. Leftover sushi sat on the sidewalk. An umbrella sporting daisies lay broken nearby. A waylaid grocery shopping cart held its own load of refuse.
"It's frustrating," she said in May. "It's depressing. I want all of our bus stops to look good."
A few months ago, Pike decided to try to do something about it. Many emails and trash bags later, her campaign resulted in an unexpected turn this week.
The private firm that maintains the shelter removed it and its accompanying bench and trash can on Tuesday morning. That company, an advertising company called Outdoor Promotions, told the Regional Transportation District in a letter last Friday that it would be removing the shelter.
"It appears that it's just getting to be too much to maintain," said RTD spokeswoman Pauline Haberman.
A representative for the company declined to speak on the record on Monday and has not responded to requests for comments since then.
"It seems like instead of trying to deal with the problem they're just trying to erase it," Pike said Tuesday.
Pike's crusade started last winter.
She was eight months pregnant, standing in about 6 inches of snow, and had just missed her bus. She stared at a pile of trash and resolved that she'd had enough.
"I decided, 'you know what? I'm going to call RTD,' " she recalled.
That call started Pike's journey through the labyrinth of RTD's bus shelter system. She was quickly told that her particular stop was on local government property, and thus their responsibility to maintain (most of the 9,720 bus stops in RTD's service area fall in this category; only 330 are maintained by RTD).
She also learned about an RTD program that allows citizens to "adopt" a stop and maintain it themselves. She filled out paperwork to adopt her stop and started cleaning it up herself.
But she couldn't fix things like a rusted trash can and wanted to know who could. RTD again deflected to the city, she said, and informed her that she couldn't adopt that particular stop because it was owned by Outdoor Promotions.
That company owns and maintains hundreds of shelters across the Denver metro. Records provided by the city show the company paid Denver $58,800 in permitting fees for its 147 bus shelters and kiosks from October 2022 to July 2023.
So Pike sent the company photos showing trash strewn around her stop. In reply, Pike said, she received photos after they cleaned it. But the company didn't keep up with the amount of trash at the stop, she said.
"It doesn't seem like it's enough, and the city and RTD should be demanding more," she said, adding: "I feel embarrassed for the city, really. They say that we should be taking the bus, getting out of our cars. Meanwhile, all these cars drive by every morning watching neighbors stand literally in filth waiting for the bus. How are they going to say that's something to promote?"
Now, despite the wants of RTD riders like Pike, they will be getting less.
A city spokesperson and RTD's Haberman said the company had the right to remove the shelter.
"It's their asset," Haberman said.
Shelters and benches are a much-desired amenity for RTD riders -- and difficult to find. Most bus stops have nothing beyond a standard pole with the red RTD "flag," per an RTD staff presentation scheduled to be given to the agency's board on Wednesday.
That presentation calls for RTD to develop a "systemwide strategy" for assessing and improving its bus stops. But in the meantime, RTD doesn't have plans to replace the shelter at 1st and Lincoln anytime soon, RTD's Haberman said.
Regular passengers say they'll miss the shelter, which serves the very popular 0 and 0L bus lines.
"I'll have to bring my umbrella," said Donaciano Martinez, a nearby resident in his late 70s. "I have to have something to wait for the bus. Even on a day like this, when it's sunny."
Martinez noted that bus shelters have long been used by people experiencing homelessness. The city's homeless population has risen significantly in recent years; many people living on the street have said high housing costs are a key reason why.
Haberman said maintenance of bus stops is a growing issue for RTD and all of the other entities that are responsible for it.
"Crews can go out there and clean, and an hour later it may look as though it wasn't done at all," she said. "That's just an expense that is tough to justify."
Homeless individuals have been abusing the stop at 1st and Lincoln, said Bert Lee Wheeles Jr., who was standing amid his belongings in an adjacent parking lot on Tuesday afternoon.
"Some people that normally wouldn't be mean and nasty are leaving trash and trashing it, are doing drugs there now that normally wouldn't do drugs," he said. "[They think] they're not really going to get in trouble for the usage of it."
Why, he was asked, would they do that?
"I don't know," he said, before adding: "It's a way of coping."
