Denver City Council and the Regional Transportation District say a $130-million bus rapid transit overhaul is the perfect solution for 10 miles of East Colfax Avenue between the Auraria Campus and the Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora.
What’s the problem?
Colfax is actually one of the last remaining metro avenues that’s drivable almost all of the time. Drivable, sadly, has become a relative term in the metro area with the steady influx of newcomers and the absolute dearth of new and expanded roads to accommodate all the new cars, mostly carrying one person at a time.
During rush hour, east Iliff, Mississippi and Alameda avenues are choked with cars that have abandoned all hope of trying to get somewhere on I-70 or I-25 into and out of Denver. Colorado Boulevard and anywhere near Broadway and Sixth Avenue are a daily commuter nightmare that gets scarier each day.
But Colfax? It’s the region’s funky, lovable and most-hated street with two of the most high-volume metro destinations on each end of the Aurora-Denver portion. On Denver’s end, east of the State Capitol, is the Auraria campus, bustling with about 50,000 students and staff. About 10 miles east on Aurora’s side of East Colfax Avenue is where a shocking 60,000 staff, students and patients go every day to the Anschutz medical and research campus, boasting CU medical schools, University Hospital, a sprawling bioscience park, Children’s Hospital Colorado and, soon, a massive, regional veterans hospital.
Between those two mega-destinations are a huge assortment of sleazy motels, trendy restaurants, stellar theaters, pawn shops, grocery stores, homes and hundreds of assorted gems and turds. Colfax is the metro area’s avenue of dreams: good, bad and ugly. What it isn’t: A traffic problem — not in the same way that Parker Road, Dam Road, University Boulevard, Colorado Boulevard and I-225 near I-70 and I-25 are really, really serious problems.
In fact, other than the intersections at Speer Boulevard, Broadway, Colorado Boulevard and Peoria Street, it’s a relative joy to motor on, or to take the legendary 15. That’s the busiest RTD bus line in Denver. It’s never boring. If you get on after getting some Tacos y Papusas or Voodoo Donuts, the 15 is dinner, a show and a ride. Sure, there are lots of people who say the 15 is unsafe, but they’re usually the same kind of people incensed by having to “press 1 English.” There may be a few drunks and people who make a living in ways that you can’t put on a real job application, but it’s all part of the charm of a street where everybody in Colorado might have business along there.
What Denver wants to do is redesign the segment from Auraria to Aurora, reducing lanes for cars and creating a so-called Bus Rapid Transit system, essentially dedicated lanes for buses. As you might guess, the bus lanes are for buses only when there are the most cars on the road. Denver points to how well the system works on parts of Broadway and Lincoln, without pointing out that there are far fewer buses on those roads, and they’re wide, one-way streets.
As part of the BRT program, which does include Aurora, the venerable 15 would get greatly improved buses that load and unload people faster, allow for ticket sales at the bus stop to reduce time spent getting on board, and RTD will pay closer attention to the “flow” of buses on the ‘Fax so that you don’t seem to either wait hours for The Ride, or see a fleet of 15s following each other like a school of fish.
They’re excellent ideas and improvements by RTD that are needed there — and all over the metro area.
But dedicated bus lanes will only slow car traffic and push commuters onto other already-overcrowded routes, especially in Aurora. It will do little to improve ridership and actually get Colfax motorists on the bus.
What might have done something to actually help change the character of the Colfax strip and increase ridership would have been to pursue former Denver mayoral candidate Chris Romer’s push to re-install the Colfax Trolley. Romer was thinking 20 years down the line, when cheap Colfax real estate became the last place in the metro area to build out chic, and a trolley would speed that up. It would also give mass transit on the avenue seriously needed cache, something that has worked well with light rail.
Denver pooh-poohed the idea and Romer’s candidacy several years back, saying it was expensive and hard to do. This from a city that doesn’t blink an eye at wanting to tear I-70 apart for five years and spend $1 billion to bury parts of it north of Denver City Park so kids can play tag on top of it.
Denver wanted to run this BRT thing down Aurora’s road, too, but A-Town types would have none of it, pointing out the obvious: that it wouldn’t work, would make bad parking problems even worse, and would cause a commuter calamity.
We’ve all seen how clever Denver commuter planners can be after they hot-wired northbound Santa Fe Drive to northbound I-25 at West Alameda Avenue. Equally entertaining is the labyrinth of streets and disappearing drives in Stapleton and Northfield that make those great places to avoid.
Just leave Colfax alone until someone comes up with a real plan for surface rail or a trolley or subway or flying carpets or something more reasonable than reconfiguring one of the few working avenues in Denver to make it yet another place you dread to drive.
Denver, like Aurora, has real problems: Shootings, parking, potholes and dwindling unique names for pot shops. Fix the stuff that’s broke.
Follow @EditorDavePerry on Twitter and Facebook or reach him at dperry@aurorasentinel.com or 303-750-7555.