CO: Denver’s Colfax rapid bus line project crosses into Aurora for first time, kicking off 18 months of road work

The East Colfax rapid bus line project will creep over the Denver city line into Aurora for the first time this week, promising an expansion of road work — along with the inevitable headaches — for businesses and motorists along the busy thoroughfare over the next 18 months.

The $280 million project aims to improve travel times for riders on Regional Transportation District buses plying one of metro Denver’s busiest roads. But for Sean Buchan, a co-owner of Cerebral Brewing, the Aurora phase could amount to a second economic body blow.

His brewery at East Colfax Avenue and Monroe Street in Denver has endured 18 months of construction, slicing 20% out of his bottom line as chain-link fencing and closed side streets have chased away customers. Now Buchan will have to face a new round of disruption at one of his other breweries at Colfax and Florence Street — four miles to the east in Aurora.

“We saw people who would no longer drive to get here,” he said of the overhaul that began in Denver in the fall of 2024, generally starting at Broadway and moving east. “We saw a drastic year-over-year reduction in business.”

One consolation for businesses along the Aurora segment of the project is that planners are employing a totally different design than what’s being used for the 5.4 miles of Colfax from Broadway to Yosemite Street in Denver.

The Denver segment is closer to a full “bus rapid transit” design — with dedicated bus lanes in the center of the street. But in Aurora, buses will migrate to the sides of Colfax and join the general flow of traffic once they cross the line dividing the two cities.

Travel time for bus riders is projected to drop by 15 to 30 minutes along the corridor from what it is on the Route 15 and Route 15L buses that serve East Colfax now. The new rapid bus system, promising easier boarding and a pickup frequency of less than every five minutes, is expected to launch at the end of 2027.

“While construction on the Aurora portion of the corridor is expected to move at a quicker pace and with less disruption than work occurring in Denver, we recognize that any level of construction activity can be challenging for nearby businesses,” said Shawn Albert, the deputy project director for the East Colfax Avenue BRT project.

Albert works for Denver’s Department of Transportation and Infrastructure, which is overseeing the entire effort.

“We will maintain access to all businesses during the construction, but some temporary pedestrian detours may be needed to accommodate specific construction activities,” he said.

Several businesses in the Denver section of the project have closed or moved because of the construction, including Misfit Snack Bar and Colfax and Cream, a coffee and ice cream joint.

Those who haven’t turned out the lights are on the edge, Buchan said.

“Everyone who didn’t close was waving the white flag and asking for help,” he said.

Buchan received $15,000 from Denver’s Business Impact Opportunity Fund, which he said covered about a month’s worth of payroll for his dozen or so employees. He has had to cut his staff’s working hours but hasn’t laid anyone off.

“It’s been pretty brutal,” he said.

Mixed-flow traffic, station improvements

Work on Aurora’s 3.1-mile segment of the Colfax project is set to kick off Wednesday with utility work near Havana Street, Albert said. Work will generally proceed from west to east over the life of the project, with the eastern terminus at Interstate 225, near the Anschutz Medical Campus.

More involved station work will begin this summer, Albert said. The total cost for the Aurora segment is nearly $26 million — $14 million of which comes from city funds.

Carlie Campuzano, Aurora’s deputy director of transportation and mobility, said there will be 22 stations in the city — 11 on each side of Colfax.

“There will be station improvements,” she said. “There will be a shelter added at every station.”

The stations will have ticket kiosks so that fares don’t have to be paid onboard the buses, saving time. Some of the stations will feature real-time arrival screens and level boarding, making it seamless for wheelchairs and people with disabilities to get on and off the buses.

Campuzano said that while the Aurora segment looks and works differently from the Denver segment, it meets the standards for what constitutes a bus rapid transit system.

“For BRT, there’s a menu for different strategies,” she said.

According to a 2024 BRT white paper from the American Public Transportation Association, the organization posited that there is no single way to design a project, saying “… flexible systems are important, especially since many BRT systems operate in dynamic urban environments.”

“While a majority of BRT (lines) … operate at least a portion of the system in some form of dedicated bus lanes (median, side, or curb-running), a majority also have a portion of the system that also operates in mixed flow, which highlights the flexibility of BRT,” the organization said.

Mixed flow is what Aurora is getting, meaning the buses will ride with the overall traffic flow on Colfax rather than in a bus-only lane. But buses will receive priority signalization at intersections — “an early green or an extended green time,” according to Campuzano — to keep them moving swiftly.

Jill Locantore, the executive director of the pro-transit Denver Streets Partnership, is disappointed that the design on the Denver side of the project didn’t extend into Aurora.

“I think it’s a misnomer to call it bus rapid transit in Aurora without dedicated bus lanes,” she said. “When the buses are running in mixed flow, it will not be rapid because the buses will be stuck in traffic.”

Locantore holds out hope that if BRT notably improves the transit experience on the 8.5-mile corridor over the next few years, the side lanes of East Colfax in Aurora could eventually be turned into exclusive bus lanes.

“Making it a dedicated bus lane just takes paint and signs,” she said.

What is bus rapid transit?
While not all cities’ bus rapid transit lines are the same, the systems are generally defined by several key characteristics*: 

• Dedicated, bus-only lanes in the center of the roadway.
• Pre-board ticketing or scanning.
• Cross-traffic turning prohibitions (on left turns) for cars on the same roadway.
• Lifted medians for stations to allow easier, platform-level boarding.

*Denver’s segment of Colfax BRT will follow these more closely, with Aurora’s segment set to run buses in mixed traffic.

The reason behind Aurora’s less-robust approach to BRT lies beyond the dynamics of East Colfax itself, said Doug Monroe, RTD’s manager of corridor planning. While the Denver stretch of the project is buttressed by alternating east-west routes to help relieve traffic on Colfax — East 13th and 14th avenues to the south and East 17th and 18th avenues to the north — Aurora’s street grid is different.

“Aurora does not have that capacity on their parallel street network,” Monroe said. “The city was concerned about impacts to traffic on Colfax.”

Up to 35 articulated buses — larger versions of a typical city bus — will move through the entire Colfax BRT corridor on any given day, Monroe said. While much of RTD’s ridership was decimated by the agency’s orders to severely restrict capacity on its buses and trains during the coronavirus pandemic, Monroe said the Colfax corridor has bounced back faster than the system as a whole in recent years.

It now has 16,000 to 17,000 daily riders, he said, compared to nearly 22,000 before the pandemic restrictions.

Not a one-size-fits-all project

Shoshana Lew, the executive director of the Colorado Department of Transportation, is comfortable with the lack of design continuity between the Denver and Aurora segments.

“There are pros and cons to each approach,” she said in an interview with The Denver Post.

Other bus rapid transit corridors in metro Denver that are under construction, such as the Diagonal Highway between Boulder and Longmont, or in the planning stages, like Federal and Colorado boulevards, aren’t carbon copies of each other, Lew said.

“Colfax is the busiest bus line in the system,” Monroe said.

“I think it’s phenomenal that each city is taking the lead in what it looks like,” she said. “None of these are going to be one-size-fits-all for all areas.”

Aurora’s BRT efforts come at a time when the city is making efforts to rejuvenate the Colfax corridor, which has struggled with crime and underinvestment for years. Last fall, Aurora voters approved the formation of a downtown development authority, which will have the power to draw on growing tax dollars in the form of tax-increment financing to invest in the corridor. The goal is to support small businesses, housing, safety and neighborhood improvements.

As the overall Colfax BRT project hit its halfway point last month, brewery owner Buchan said he was worried about how his Aurora location would be impacted once the machines and work crews moved into place.

“I think some of the damage has been done — people see Colfax as hard to navigate,” he said.

Cerebral Brewing in Aurora, which opened in 2022 as an offshoot of the original Denver location, serves as the company’s production facility. It also has a taproom that Buchan hopes will remain a neighborhood gathering spot.

Despite being impacted twice by construction over the course of the project, Buchan says he’s a transit supporter and hopes bus rapid transit, once up and running, will inject life into the corridor and benefit the businesses that make Colfax, Colfax.

©2026 MediaNews Group, Inc.
Visit at denverpost.com. 
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.