HOP, SKIP, and JUMP aboard a Boulder Bus

[intro music] 

Clarence Eckerson Jr.:  [00:03] Streetfilms is in Boulder, Colorado.   

[music] 

Cris Jones:  [00:22] In Boulder we have seven high frequency transit routes called the Hop, Skip, Jump, Bound, Dash, Stampede and Bolt.  And each of the routes has a unique identity, and that is designated by the logo that you’ll see at the bus stop, and the actual look and feel of the bus itself.  We’ve had graphic designers create cool, interesting graphics that are placed all over the buses.   

Myriah Conroy: [00:44] They’re smaller buses.  The drivers play their music, not too loudly, and they’re just much more of a Boulder flair type of bus.  They run on really just popular routes from various destinations around town.  And my kid knows them all by just the skin that’s on them because they all have really distinctive looks.   

John Tayer:  [01:01] What is unique about these transit systems is they’re not operated and envisioned from the top down, from the transit agency and then imposed on the community.  Instead, they’re really built from the bottom up, from the grassroots.   

Cris Jones:  [01:15] Boulder is a city of just over 100,000 people and on any given day we have over 20,000 people boarding local transit services, and over 30,000 people boarding local and regional transit services.  So more than a quarter of our population essentially is riding on a bus on any given day.   

[music] 

Will Toor:  [01:40] If you were to go back to 1990 and ask about what role did public transit play in Boulder, it was essentially a social service for people who had no other choice about how they got around.  Around that time period, folks began sitting down and saying, this isn’t what we want, we want to maintain the social service but we want a public transit system that can compete for people who have other choices.  Out of that came the idea of a new model where we would be offering high frequency routes that came every few minutes, routes would have a friendly feeling so you didn’t feel like you were a criminal when you stepped on the bus, instead you felt like you were a valued customer.  Routes would have a very simple route, either basically straight line up and down or going in a circle. 

John Tayer:  [02:22] The city convened a group of citizens who then considered, okay, what should be the character of this bus system?  What would be a good name?  What would be a good colour scheme?  What would be a good image and marketing strategy for this system.   

Will Toor:  [02:35] We really came to that by talking to people and asking, well, what would make you want to ride the bus?  And, you know, it wasn’t rocket science but it was just what any private business would do. 

[music] 

Cris Jones:  [02:52] One of the first projects that the Transportation Department set out with was the creation of the Eco Pass, which is a universal bus pass that makes users eligible to ride any of the transit system throughout the region at no charge.  So that was our first tool to really increase transit use throughout the community.   

Will Toor:  [03:11] And what we’ve seen is that a combination of the transit passes where a Downtown parking district, you know, people who are paying those parking permits and paying the meter fees, are actually helping to pay for Eco Passes for everybody who works in the Downtown. 

Cris Jones:  [03:25] Here we are sitting on the Hop, it’s the city of Boulder’s flagship transit service.  We’ve got music playing on XM radios, we’ve got comfortable seats where people face each other so we can have conversations.  We have friendly drivers who we know their name because they have their name tags up on the windshields.  It runs every seven to ten minutes from 7am to 7pm.  So it’s really convenient and it’s based on what the community told us they wanted.  They didn’t want to carry a schedule anymore and so we provided a service that they didn’t have to.   

John Tayer:  [03:53] I came to the city of Boulder when they were first instituting the Hop.  What then became such a success that we then had to consider how to replicate it and sell it to our Regional Transportation District, which is the funding source for the transit in the Denver area.   

[music] 

Myriah Conroy:  [04:16] I do think we have a great network of buses here in Boulder and I also especially love that you can take your bike on the front.   

Marni Ratzel:  [04:23] The public transportation buses throughout the city, and actually throughout the Denver metro region, accommodate bikes on the bus.  A bike rack for two bikes is on the front of the bus, and all of our regional buses, you can store your bike underneath.  Normally when you’re commuting in during the week, they’ll let you get about six bikes under there.  There’s three luggage racks, two per luggage rack.   

Cris Jones:  [04:47] Bike to transit is a very popular mode for people trying to get to the city of Boulder and around the city of Boulder.  There are some destinations where it’s much more logical to get there by bus, but otherwise you’re riding your bike.  With so many people riding their bike, they also have an Eco Pass, we want to provide a way for them to get their bike to the bus stop, if the bike rack on the bus is full, we need them to have a place to lock up their bike so they can still take their transit trip.   

Lynn Guissinger:  [05:13] Boulder is a great place to raise a family and one of the main reasons is that transportation is so easy.  The kids start riding bikes to school at a very young age and then start taking the bus around town.  I think it’s very different from growing up in many places where you have to wait for someone to come home and take you to your friend’s house, or take you down to the mall for something to do.  And it means that the kids have a sense of freedom growing up and they learn to ride the buses and use them.   

[music] 

Cris Jones:  [05:48] The lesson that other transit agencies and transit planners can learn from what we’ve done here in Boulder is don’t make assumptions about your customers.  The best thing to do is ask them what they want and give it to them.  On our peak months we’ve carried over 24,000 passengers per day.  Compared to a similar sized city, Longmont down the road, their local bus system carries under a thousand passengers per day on their entire local transit system.  So it’s been a great success.