RTD
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All RTD rides will be free on Tuesday, February 4, as the metro Denver transit agency celebrates Transit Equity Day.
Though RTD didn’t offer a free month or more of rides for adults last year as it had in 2022 and 2023, the agency is still finding ways to make some days fare-free; people under nineteen can always ride for free while adults got free rides on Election Eay and New Year’s Eve in 2024.
Approved by the RTD board of directors in December, Transit Equity Day celebrates Rosa Parks, who famously refusal to give up her seat and move to the back of the bus in 1955, spurring the Montgomery Bus Boycott. In November 1956, almost a year after Parks’s protest, the Supreme Court ruled segregation on buses unconstitutional.
Though Parks’s protest occurred in December, Transit Equity Day is celebrated on her birthday, February 4. According to RTD, services are now free every year on February 4.
“The agency exists to serve others, and the introduction of Zero Fare for Transit Equity Day reinforces its commitment to advance equity in every aspect of its work,” RTD General Manager and CEO Debra Johnson said in an announcement about the free fare day.
The United States Department of Transportation first celebrated Transit Equity Day in 2021, recognizing that equal access to public transportation is a civil right. Though Parks wasn’t in Colorado at the time, Denver was the site of the Gang of 19 protests in 1978, during which disability activists led by Reverend William Blake ditched their wheelchairs and crawled onto then-inaccessible RTD buses at the Colfax and Broadway bus stop to show the inequity of Denver’s public transit system.
Their demonstration caused RTD to become the first mass transit system in the nation to be fully wheelchair-accessible, and helped inspire the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990, another historic moment for civil rights and public transit.
The Gang of 19 is slated to be remembered in major renovation plans for Civic Center Park, with a large central feature of the proposed memorial bearing the words “We will ride.”
