Midday Bustang trips to serve downtown Fort Collins

FORT COLLINS – The Colorado Department of Transportation has extended two of its six planned Denver express bus routes to serve Fort Collins’ Downtown Transit Center – but the extension won’t help morning and evening commuters.

The northern terminus for most trips connecting Northern Colorado to Union Station in Denver still will be the park-and-ride at Interstate 25 and Harmony Road once service begins this spring, said Michael Timlin, project manager for CDOT’s planned “Bustang” express bus system. However, what he described as two midday “essential-service” round trips will extend to the downtown center at Laporte Avenue and Mason Street, which also is a connecting point for many local Transfort bus routes and the new MAX bus rapid transit system.

Morning and evening commuters still will need to either drive to the I-25 and Harmony park-and-ride – now labeled the “Harmony Transfer Center” – or ride to it via Transfort’s newly extended Route 16, which connects to MAX at the South Transit Center, southwest of College Avenue and Harmony.

SPONSORED CONTENT

Business Cares: April 2024

In Colorado, 1 in 3 women, 1 in 3 men and 1 in 2 transgender individuals will experience an attempted or completed sexual assault in their lifetime. During April, we recognize Sexual Assault Awareness Month with the hopes of increasing conversations about this very important issue.

The Route 16 extension is one of several route changes Transfort will institute beginning Monday. Complete information is available on the Transfort website. 

“We haven’t completed real-time testing” of the Bustang routes, Timlin said, but he added that CDOT’s preliminary estimates are that trips to Union Station in normal traffic will take about an hour and 25 minutes from the downtown center, an hour and five minutes from I-25 and Harmony, and 55 minutes from Bustang’s Loveland stop, near I-25 and U.S. Highway 34.

Bustang also will run two other routes from Union Station – south to Colorado Springs and west to Vail and Glenwood Springs. At Union Station, travelers can connect to Amtrak, Regional Transportation District local, express and regional buses, light-rail lines, the free downtown Denver MallRide and MetroRide, and – starting next year – FasTracks commuter-rail service to Denver International Airport.

CDOT plans to launch the royal purple Bustangs in late spring, and Timlin said a firm start date should be in place by the end of January once what he called “critical-process testing” is complete. “It’s mostly IT stuff like tracking,” he said. “There’s pretty advanced electronics on these buses.”

Access agreements with some of the jurisdictions through which Bustangs will pass also need to be finalized, he said.

The high-end, 50-passenger, handicapped-accessible Bustang buses, similar to Greyhounds, will have bathrooms, reclining seats, trays, Wi-Fi, places to plug in laptops and mobile devices, bicycle and luggage racks and storage compartments.

CDOT’s corral of Bustangs were bought for $7.3 million from the Funding Advancements for Surface Transportation and Economic Recovery (FASTER) Act of 2009, which raised vehicle registration fees and fines to generate about $200 million a year for state transportation projects. About $15 million a year of that is dedicated to transit projects, and the Bustangs will be paid for with that money. CDOT hired Horizon Coach Lines to operate the buses for about $2 million a year.