A new way to reach Arches National Park is now available from Moab

KEY TAKEAWAYS

A new pilot program offers shuttle service between downtown Moab to Arches National Park.
The service, free with a park pass, runs until Oct. 31, before returning in 2027.
Local leaders aim to improve park access and will review the pilot's success.

MOAB — An experiment to improve transportation challenges at Arches National Park is now available, albeit for a limited time, while local leaders test the concept.

Moab to Arches Shuttle officially launched on Tuesday, offering connections between downtown Moab and Arches National Park.

Riders can hop on at the Maverik (947 S. Main), Moab Information Center (25 E. Center), Moab Rock Shop (600 N. Main) or Grand County Transit Hub (the intersection of U.S. 191 and state Route 198) and the shuttle will take them to the Arches National Park Visitor Center.

The bus operates on 15- to 30-minute intervals, first leaving the Maverik at 8:10 a.m. and continuing until the final bus leaves at 4:40 p.m. The first bus departing the park leaves at 8:40 a.m. and the last leaves at 5:10 p.m.

The service itself is free, but riders are required to have a valid national park pass before boarding. Passes can be purchased online or at the Moab Information Center.

More details about the service can be found on the shuttle's website. Once at the park, riders can take park buses that go to popular recreation areas like the Delicate Arch and Windows trailheads.

"The new service could make it significantly easier to explore Arches and provide greater access to the park's most popular areas," the Moab Office of Tourism said in a statement.

It's also temporary, at least for now. The pilot program will last through Oct. 31 before it returns next spring. It will run between March 1 and June 30, 2027, before local leaders decide whether to implement the service permanently.

State transportation officials and Grand County leaders gathered the funding for the program earlier this year, combining to allocate $1.5 million to match $1.5 million that the National Park Service awarded the project.

"This is a big milestone for Grand County and for everyone who cares about the future of Moab and Arches National Park," said Grand County Commissioner Brian Martinez after the funding was secured.

Grand County's decision came after some local leaders pleaded with Arches National Park to scrap its timed entry pilot program, which they argued capped visitation.

The park implemented the service in 2022, following a string of temporary entry closures tied to full parking lots in 2021. The system solved the closures, but the University of Utah Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute estimated that the timed entry system reduced Arches visitation by 14% after it was implemented.

The institute also found that Grand County's visitor economy still grew, with visitor spending increasing by 22% in the first three years of the program.

Arches opted not to bring back timed entry this year, and year-over-year visitation is up, but not significantly, per National Park Service data. The park logged over 960,000 visits over the first seven months of this year, which is a 4% increase from the first seven months of 2025.

The timed-entry system was only implemented between April and October. Visitation between April 1 and June 30 of this year rose by 7% from last year, but the park also reported a 12% year-over-year visitation decrease in July.

It's unclear what caused these visitation swings.

Either way, local leaders hope that the new shuttle will help get people to the park in an efficient manner.

"We've talked about an Arches shuttle for almost two decades, and I'm grateful to every partner who helped get us here," Grand County Commission Chairwoman Melodie McCandless said in May. "This is what we can accomplish when we all come together."

The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.