75 Spaces, a 5:15 a.m. Bus and a Friday Ribbon in Murfreesboro
The commuters have already found it. The ribbon is the part still to come. On Friday, Oct. 16, WeGo Public Transit, the City of Murfreesboro and the Tennessee Department of Transportation will formally cut the opening on the new park and ride at 725 Bridge Avenue, a lot that has been taking riders to Nashville for about a week.
The celebration starts with a tour at 10:30 a.m. and moves into a speaking program at 11 a.m. at the Murfreesboro Transit Center next door. Mayor Shane McFarland, TDOT's public transportation section manager Kaitlyn McClanahan and WeGo chief executive Steve Bland are scheduled to speak.
What riders are getting
The lot holds 75 vehicles and is the permanent home of the park-and-ride service for WeGo Route 84, the express bus that runs between Murfreesboro and downtown Nashville. Buses run hourly from 5:15 a.m. to 5:15 p.m., and the route goes from the MTSU campus to Central and Fifth Avenue in Nashville. It replaces the Stones River Mall lot that riders had used until now, a move WeGo flagged back in June, when it also announced that Route 84 would begin stopping at the Transit Center on New Salem Highway on July 5.
That second detail matters more than it sounds. Because the express bus now calls at the Transit Center, someone who rides one of Murfreesboro Transit's local routes can step off, cross to the bus bound for Nashville and never touch a car. The partners call the site a first-of-its-kind regional connectivity hub for Middle Tennessee.
A building that came first
The lot is the second act of a larger project. The Transit Center opened to the public on Sept. 8, 2025, on a 5.5-acre site, replacing the downtown hub that had served Murfreesboro Transit since 2007. The construction contract ran $17 million, covered by $9 million in state IMPROVE Act money, $5 million in federal funds and a $2.8 million local match. The building holds a passenger pavilion, a bus maintenance facility and the offices that dispatch a fleet of a dozen buses.
The timing is not an accident. The city's population has grown roughly 20 percent in five years, according to Murfreesboro Transit's Russ Brashear, and regional bus ridership rose 19 percent over the past year, with the Murfreesboro route climbing 50 percent. Anyone who has watched I-24 go to a crawl on a weekday morning can read the numbers without a chart; the state's $9.2 billion Choice Lanes deal for the same corridor is designed in part to keep buses moving, and the city has noted that buses using those lanes will ride free.
The view from the 5:15
Riders describe the appeal plainly. One regular gave up driving for a bus pass after concluding that an hour of interstate traffic meant he could not count on arriving anywhere on time. Another catches the first bus at 5:15 a.m. a few days a week for his Nashville office and says he would like to see more connections, because more public transportation, in his words, opens more opportunities for more people to travel. Several riders say they hope additional routes follow as ridership grows.
The road work around the Transit Center is moving too; our report on the New Salem Highway and Veterans Parkway project covers the latest milestone nearby.
Fares, and the full Route 84 timetable, are on the WeGo website. For anyone who wants to see the place before trusting it with a 5 a.m. alarm, Friday's tour at the Transit Center is the chance, and the lot at 725 Bridge Avenue is, as of this week, already in service.
Image: illustrative, AI-generated – not the actual location.
