The Regional Transportation District (RTD) will reopen Boulder Junction next week, restoring bus service to a neighborhood built around public transit but left without it for the past five years.
The station near 30th and Pearl opened in 2015 but was closed in April 2020, when RTD cut service across the Front Range in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Since then, city officials and councilmembers have repeatedly pressed RTD to bring it back.
Starting Sept. 2, RTD will operate the FF4 route between Boulder Junction and Denver’s Civic Center. The bus will run eight times in the morning between 7 a.m. and 8:30 a.m. and eight times in the evening between 4 p.m. and 5:30 p.m., according to RTD’s service plan.
RTD will also shift weekday AB2 trips to Denver International Airport from the Downtown Boulder Station to Boulder Junction. On Saturdays, those trips will be renamed AB3 and continue from Downtown Boulder Station.
The city said the HOP bus line, which links CU Boulder, the Pearl Street Mall and the 28th Street Mall, will soon stop closer to Boulder Junction as well. But RTD has discontinued Route 236, which once connected Boulder Junction with the Table Mesa Park-and-Ride in South Boulder, citing low ridership.
Lynn Guissinger, an RTD board member for Boulder, said staffing shortages delayed the reopening of Boulder Junction.
“This is something that has been really important, certainly to the electeds in the city and the county and many of our riders,” Guissinger said Tuesday. “Hopefully it will get good ridership.”
Boulder Junction is also planned as a stop for the long-promised commuter rail line that RTD pledged when voters approved a sales tax in 2004. Its reopening comes as new housing is under construction and as the city plans for much more. Earlier this month, the Roadhouse Depot, a restaurant located in a historic train station, closed.
parking in the area?