Meet 2024 Mobility Hero Sergio Rubio, who is driven to help his customers

If you have been on Route 204 in Boulder recently, chances are you’ve seen Sergio Rubio. The almost-12-year RTD bus operator often provides his customers with more than a wide smile and a warm greeting – he has helped many people plan a trip, understand the agency’s fare structure and figure out efficient connections. And he does this in English and Spanish.

It is these qualities that have led Rubio to be named a 2024 Mobility Hero through the Boulder County Mobility and Access Coalition and Mobility for All Program. More specifically, the organization has named the Boulder-based operator this year’s Favorite Regional Bus Driver.

Jessica Villena Sánchez, Bilingual Mobility for All Programs Coordinator, has been a passenger of Rubio’s a few times while traveling on the regional FF1 route. “I have seen him explain to passengers in Spanish the fare structure, how to make connections,” she said. “He's very patient with people!”

Rubio, a life-long Denver resident, is a first-generation American whose parents came to the United States from Mexico and were not fluent in English – and his mother never learned how to drive. Consequently, he said, she learned how to catch RTD buses from North Denver, where their family lived, to Five Points, where she worked. From early childhood, Rubio frequently tagged along on these trips and on errands, typically to translate for her.

“All my life I’ve been on RTD buses, because that's how my mother got around,” Rubio said. “It still blows my mind that she was able to do it at that time.”

Now, he said, “I see a lot of people who are coming on the bus who don't speak English very well, and they remind me of my mother. I just like being able to help them out. I get the opportunity quite often on RTD.”

Treating his customers with respect and dignity is important to Rubio, who is focused on delivering a friendly, safe and timely ride while in the driver’s seat. He watches for people running for the bus, for example, and doesn’t leave a stop before he is supposed to. This perspective is borne of personal experience, when Rubio and his mother “could almost touch the bus, and it would just take off,” he said. “I always remember that.”

While Rubio pursued other work before joining RTD – as a peer counselor, a construction superintendent and a certified nursing assistant at a mental health facility – he jokes that his path to the agency may have been embedded in his subconscious as a boy. Then, he would turn his brother’s 10-speed bicycle on its side, with the back tire up in the air, “and I would pretend that it was the steering wheel and the pedal would open the door to the buses,” he remembered. “How ironic is that?”

Once in training to be a bus operator, Rubio said, “I thought, why didn’t I think of this before? I've always said that I wish I would have done this sooner.”

When his workday begins, Rubio looks forward to finding out whom he will meet – and which regulars he will see. He knows who will be waiting at each stop, as well as who will be there if he arrives a minute later. Getting to know his customers, he said, is a pleasure.

Being able to educate and advise are a point of pride. Last month, when RTD offered zero fare on National Vote Early Day, a Spanish-speaking customer boarded Rubio’s bus with a day pass and tried to use it. She was grateful to learn that the fare wasn’t needed – and that she could ride again at no cost on Election Day.

Rubio recalls another woman on his bus who was trying to get to work. Google directed her to take a bus to Boulder, then catch another one to Erie. But he knew that the bus she planned to take ran only in the morning and the evening at that time, so she would be at Downtown Boulder Station all day – and not at her job. The operator directed her to go to Union Station, take the Route 120X to Wagon Road Park-n-Ride and catch a rideshare from there. “That's probably going to be the better way for you to do it,” he told her.

The woman approached Rubio a month later as he was walking through Union Station. “She told me she did what I suggested, and that she ended up finding work and lived close to that Park-and-Ride,” he said. “I told her, ‘That’s perfect.’”

When you've been driving for a while, Rubio observed, you know the different routes and connections that an internet search doesn't pick up. If he doesn’t have the answer, he said, customers are often willing to help one another, “and then you learn something as well.”

Rubio doesn’t mind when customers talk to him – with his counseling background, he said, “I know how to talk to people so they answer their own question.” He aims to be friendly to every person on his bus and tells them, “I appreciate you guys as customers, because without you, I wouldn't have a job.” Rubio said he aims every day to do the best job he can.

He doesn’t want to be anywhere else. “As soon as I started working here and meeting co-workers and learning how the system works, I quickly realized this is where I want to retire from,” Rubio said. “This is the last job that I want to have.”