RFTA Director Puts Community Listening at Center of New Master Plan

Aspen —The sound of a bus engine idling in the cold morning air is a familiar soundtrack to the Western Slope, but for Hannah Klausman, the Regional Director of Planning for the Roaring Fork Transportation Authority (RFTA), the noise is often a distraction from the silence she’s trying to capture. In a recent piece for the Aspen Times, Klausman argues that the most critical step in mapping out RFTA’s next twenty years isn’t data analysis or route optimization — it’s simply listening.

It’s a counterintuitive stance for an agency that prides itself on technical expertise. We tend to assume that if you have enough traffic counts, ridership figures, and demographic studies, the solutions will reveal themselves. But Klausman points out a glaring gap in that logic: data tells you where people are going, but it rarely tells you why they’re choosing a car over a bus, or why a particular bus stop feels unsafe at dusk. It’s the difference between knowing a route is underutilized and understanding that the stop is three blocks away from the nearest housing development, with no sidewalk to reach it.

This distinction matters because the scope of RFTA’s upcoming Master Plan is enormous. Over the next year and a half, the team will examine everything from bus schedules and facility upgrades to workforce needs, technology integration, and the future of the Rio Grande Corridor and its trail network. The goal is a practical roadmap for allocating finite resources across a region that spans more than 70 miles of two distinct valleys. Given that complexity, relying solely on quantitative metrics risks missing the qualitative nuances that shape daily commutes — the subtle friction points that make public transit feel inconvenient, even when it’s technically accessible.

That’s why the first phase of the Master Plan process has focused so heavily on direct community engagement. Over the past several weeks, RFTA staff have hosted pop-up events from Aspen to Rifle, holding one-on-one conversations with residents about their transportation experiences. These interactions have yielded some unexpected insights. For instance, regular riders expressed interest in having a “singles meet-and-greet” event on the bus, while families noted the value of having booster seat options available. There was also a surprising amount of affection for the weed-management goats that graze along the Rio Grande Corridor, who have become local celebrities in their own right.

These anecdotes, combined with hundreds of sticky notes collected during in-person sessions and more than 490 pins placed on an online community survey map, paint a picture of a region that cares deeply about how it moves. People aren’t just complaining about service gaps; they’re offering specific ideas about where new stops should be located, what times service should run, and how trails should connect to transit hubs. The sheer volume of feedback suggests that the issue isn’t a lack of interest in public transportation, but rather a lack of trust that their input will actually change anything.

By making listening the central pillar of the planning process, Klausman is essentially asking residents to bridge that trust gap. She’s inviting both regular riders and non-riders to articulate their frustrations and aspirations, hoping that the act of being heard will foster a sense of ownership over the final plan. It’s a bold strategy for an agency that has historically operated behind closed doors, but it acknowledges a fundamental truth: you can’t plan for a community if you don’t understand how its members actually live their lives.

The next twenty years of RFTA’s existence will likely be shaped by the decisions made in the coming months. Whether those decisions reflect a deep understanding of local needs or merely a response to aggregate data will depend on how thoroughly the agency engages with the people who use its services every day. For now, the focus is on capturing those voices, one conversation at a time, in hopes that the resulting roadmap will be as nuanced and responsive as the region it serves.

The image of those goats grazing peacefully along the corridor, beloved by locals and mentioned in official planning documents, remains a poignant symbol of this effort to integrate the everyday textures of valley life into high-level infrastructure decisions.