FLEX bus service to connect CU, CSU beginning next year

Students, faculty members and other passengers soon will be able to ride one bus between the region’s two major college towns.

About $1.15 million in funding has been approved by the Denver Regional Council of Governments to connect Fort Collins and Boulder by extending the FLEX regional bus service that now connects Fort Collins, Loveland and Longmont. The cities of Boulder, Longmont, Loveland and Fort Collins, the University of Colorado, Colorado State University and the Regional Transportation District have been working out details of the plan. Those entities would need to chip in a total of $289,000 over three years to match the DRCOG grant.

“Anecdotally, there has been a lot of interest in that routing – among students, faculty and staff of CSU and CU as well as the public,” said Timothy Wilder, service development manager for Transfort, the city of Fort Collins’ transit system. “The universities do work together on a lot of things. So we started talking about it last year, and Boulder County submitted the grant application to DRCOG.”

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Jared Hall, a senior transportation planner for Boulder County, agreed. “When the city of Boulder and Boulder County completed their transportation master plans, both those plans recognized this as a need,” he said.

Wilder and Hall said the service probably will begin in January 2016.

Riders who wish to travel between the two universities now can transfer in Longmont between Transfort’s FLEX bus to Fort Collins and RTD’s “BOLT” regional route to Boulder, but Wilder said “that transfer acts as a barrier to ridership” because of the layover between buses and more frequent stops. “Having a one-seat ride would be a lot more desirable.”

Wilder envisions five round trips a day between Fort Collins and Boulder – two in the morning, one at midday and two in the afternoon. All would be new, dedicated trips, not extensions of current scheduled FLEX runs, because there would be fewer stops – including probably none between Longmont and Boulder. Wilder said he expects the trip between CU and CSU taking about an hour and a half.

In Boulder, Hall said, the bus could stop at the new Boulder Junction transit hub on Pearl Parkway, the downtown transit center at 14th and Walnut streets, and on the CU campus. “We might just be able to serve all three or just one,” he said, “but we’d like to do all three.”

In Fort Collins, FLEX routes currently end at the South Transit Center, southwest of College Avenue and Harmony Road, where riders can transfer to and from various city bus routes and the MAX bus rapid transit system serving CSU and downtown. Wilder said Transfort planners would like the new service to extend north to CSU and maybe downtown, but that also is still being worked out.

“We should be able to resolve all this in the next couple months,” Wilder said.

The Boulder City Council will study plans for the new service tonight as part of a general review of the city’s Transportation Master Plan. The transportation portion of the study session is to begin at 6 p.m. in council chambers at 1777 Broadway, and will be televised in Boulder on the city’s cable channel.

Northern Colorado also will be served by another new bus route in late spring when the Colorado Department of Transportation begins its express service from Fort Collins and Loveland to Denver’s Union Station. According to CDOT, the purple and black, wheelchair-accessible “Bustang” bus will include a restroom, bike racks, free Wi-Fi power outlets and USB ports. Other Bustang routes will connect Denver with Colorado Springs and Glenwood Springs.