As U.S. 36 corridor grows, call for more buses goes out

It’s pretty easy to get up and down U.S. 36 on the bus.

RTD’s Route B, which makes trips from 4 a.m. until midnight between Boulder and Denver, has the highest ridership in the RTD region, and the Park-n-Rides along the U.S. 36 Corridor are among the most utilized.

The trick is what to do when you get to the Park-n-Ride, and you don’t have a car. If you’re in Denver or Boulder, you can hop on a city bus. But some cities with Park-n-Rides don’t have much in local bus service. Superior has no service at all.

Debra Baskett, director of the U.S. 36 Transportation Management Organization, is working to change that.

Baskett, a former alternative transportation planner for the City of Boulder, is meeting with RTD representatives, city officials and businesses along U.S. 36 to improve bus service and to encourage people to use it.

She’d like to see more routes through Louisville, Lafayette, Superior, Broomfield and more frequent routes at Interlocken. She says bus service in suburbia is practically non-existent. More people will use the bus if it’s convenient and takes them where they want to go, she says.

But if RTD builds it, will you come?

Dick Sargent, an RTD board member for Golden, says plenty of routes aren’t productive. Routes between Longmont to Boulder and between Louisville to Broomfield were reported to have some of the highest subsidies among RTD’s 173 routes, based on the routes’ cost, the number of trips and the number who use it.

“How do you feel as a taxpayer paying $27 per passenger to ride a bus?” Sargent asks, adding that buses should have signs posting the cost of “subsidizing” rides. “In some cases, it’s efficient. In other cases not. I think it probably has a lot to do with density and a number of other factors.”

One of those factors is RTD’s driver shortage for the routes already in place. RTD now posts signs on its vehicles, advertising that drivers can make $11.25 per hour.

Dick McLean, an RTD board member representing Boulder and the cities west of Boulder, says RTD should consider using private companies to provide services in some areas to make up for the driver shortage. Baskett says she has talked to SuperShuttle and Yellow Cab about that issue.

“We need a circulator of some sort,” McLean says. “Interlocken is so sprawled out, and there’s so much green space, which looks very nice between the various offices, but you can’t just get off at an interchange and walk to your place of employment.

“The only way of solving that, I think, is for people at Interlocken to get together and run a circulator bus on a frequent basis that could pick people up at these (RTD) buses.”

Either way, Baskett says public transportation at Interlocken needs to keep pace with the long hours that employees likely will work there. She adds that some people clock out after the buses now available have stopped for the night, which is why they opt to driv. And even it they could catch a bus to the Park-n-Ride, local service might not be available to take them home.

“At the Broomfield Park-n-Ride, you cannot get to Interlocken, except by one route (Route 228) that runs three trips in the morning and three trips at night,” Baskett says. “There is not going to be a way to get the required number of employees to staff those jobs there without a lot more service.”

The Interlocken business park in Broomfield has 4,000 workers, many of whom live in cities along U.S. 36, and it is expected to bring in 19,000 when it reaches capacity. If everyone is in a car, driving up or down U.S. 36, it’s going to feel like driving to Los Angeles.

Gridlock. Better bring a magazine.

Several businesses are interested in improving the routes. Geneva Pharmaceuticals, Hunter Douglas, Electric Wire Corp. and BesTop, which have offices close to the corridor, should have routes running right past them, Baskett says.

The Omni Hotel at Interlocken will need an array of workers to serve its guests. The soon-to-be FlatIron Crossing, which has no bus route plans yet, will bring thousands of jobs and that many more people. There’d better be service, Baskett warns.

The question, however, is whether people would use it.

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