After spending much of this year travelling to cities with great public transit systems – Portland and Chicago to name two – I was curious to see how Denver’s compared. It didn’t look too promising, but I was hoping for a pleasant surprise.
Sadly, the surprise was more of an unpleasant one.
Denver Public Transit Details
For a tourist, Denver’s public transit system is not very extensive. Essentially, there’s a train that goes from the airport to Union Station, and a free bus that travels down the main street, but if you want to get anywhere else in the downtown area efficiently, you’re in trouble.
We tried both forms of public transit.
A Line Train
Despite being terrible, this was the better of the two experiences.
Combine uncomfortable seats and limited legroom with a lack of mask-wearing, low frequencies, and a notable time increase over Ubering, and you get the A Line Train.
Thanks to our delay at the gate on arrival, we missed the train we had originally planned to catch, and had to wait 45 minutes for the next one.
I almost would have preferred to walk 5 hours to downtown Denver, because it was not a fun train ride. The seats were filled with crumbs and even more uncomfortable than they looked.
Thankfully our return ride was a substantial improvement – and decidedly more interesting, as I overheard both a Frontier and a United flight attendant chatting. But still, the number of people without masks (and with their feet up on the seats) was not impressive.
The views from the train in the daytime were especially nice as we passed by the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge.
Regardless, I would only recommend taking the train if you are on a budget.
MallRide Bus
This is where our experience got really fun. I’m not sure how to accurately describe it – to be fair it was 10:15pm on a Friday night, and it’s a free bus, but I’m not convinced I’ve ever seen anything quite like this.
Despite masks being required, we were the only people who consistently kept them on for the entire ride. Two others boarded with masks but removed them soon afterwards.
On one side of us was a group whose conversation seemed to consist of nothing but swear words. To the other side was a second group who seemed to think they were inside a bar, not a bus.
I think it could best be summed up by the following video, as it’s the closest representation to what it was like (sound up, I removed the visual to respect privacy). I made sure to choose a section of the video with minimal bad language and screaming, so you can just imagine what it was like at its worst point. There may be explicit content in this video.
Needless to say, I didn’t set foot on a bus again. Until we had to in order to get to Union Station for our return flight.
(Disclaimer: I saw multiple MallRide buses during the day, and while there was still a lack of mask-wearing, they all seemed calmer.)
Final Thoughts
Frankly, the Denver public transit system is awful. I would not use it again. And there is no circumstance under which I would suggest taking young kids on the MallRide Bus at night.
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