Think fast, Aurora. Denver’s about to throw you under the bus, this time on Colfax.
You think we’d be used to this by now. Denver has a problem. Denver comes up with a solution. Denver announces what they’re going to do. They have no clue or concern about how it affects anyone or anything outside the Mile High City. Repeat.
This time, it’s not a proverbial bus, but a real one, the storied No. 15 on Colfax. That’s the bus that runs pretty full pretty much all the time from the Auraria Campus, through Downtown Denver, past the Capitol and all the way east to Helena Street in Aurora. RTD officials say it carries about 22,000 people a day between here and Golden, and that’s going to double in the next 20 years. People coming to and from Aurora fill a lot of those bus seats. They’ll fill even more when the new VA hospital opens in a couple of years.
There are so many people riding the No. 15 that they can hardly get enough buses on the congested two lanes running east and two lanes running west across the metro area.
No one denies it’s a mess, but Denver’s delusional in thinking it alone will be coming up with the answers. The Queen City of the Plains led a study of the problem and revealed there are three changes that could make things better: Bring back the trolleys, or streetcars to the Colfax corridor; create an enhanced bus system with sexier buses that ride close to the ground, similar to shuttles used on the 16th Street Mall. Or plan 2B, which calls for saving lanes just for these or other buses. The system is called Bus Rapid Transit, allowing people to get on and off buses fast and easily. It’s a system with a lot more cache than the stinky, clunky fleet of No. 15s currently serving the line.
What Denver decided on is the Bus Rapid Transit system, because it would cost about one-third of the price of installing a $400 million street-car system on Colfax from Auraria to Anschutz. But they insist on one other enhancement that would make the BRT system work: dedicated bus lanes.
What they’re suggesting is that during peak hours, which is pretty much all morning and all afternoon, Colfax, from Auraria to I-225, would be reduced to one lane in each direction for cars.
Can you just envision what Peoria and Colfax would be like with only one lane in each direction on Colfax? This is the kind of dumb stuff Denver comes up with, and then it is shocked — shocked and dismayed — when people outside call “stupid” when they see it. This is a city that is shocked — shocked and dismayed — that Aurora and Adams County won’t let Your Mile Highness toss out the Denver International Airport agreement that created the airport, making it clear that everyone but Denver would control development outside of DIA. This is a city that thinks it deserves to spend upward of a billion dollars to bury I-70 where it rolls west of Colorado Boulevard so they can build little parks on top of it, and then charge the whole thing to state and federal taxpayers. That’s a stunt that would suck state interstate money from all over Colorado. Denver is a city that just doesn’t think outside the borders.
Our big sister city to the east is missing the bus on the bigger problem. Colfax itself has long been the overwhelming issue, for Aurora, for Denver and for Lakewood. What was once actually Main Street for all three cities has become a spotty string of car dealers, nasty motels, parasitic businesses and empty storefronts mixed up with some amazing cultural and entrepreneurial jewels. The problem is, jewels like the Aurora Fox Theater, Tattered Cover Bookstore, Anschutz Medical Campus, Voodoo Donuts and the Bluebird are too few and far between. Colfax is much more of an economic development, aesthetic and public safety quandary than it is a transportation dilemma. All three cities along the Colfax corridor have and will spend endless millions trying to chase away check-cashing stores and bring in restaurants and shops.
A bus rapid transit system isn’t going to do squat to rehabilitate the metro-area’s problem child. And if it’s combined with bus-only lanes that steal from existing motorists? It’s going to turn all of East Colfax into 10 miles of nightmarish ghetto, nothing more than an endless alley from one major destination to another.
A street-car system, or system that needs no fixed guideway, incorporated into the streetscape — like right down the middle of the road — would create an aesthetic a community hungry for that kind of retro-rehab exploit would buy into. Streetcars are the type of practical novelty that draw out-of-towners and turn local residents into tourists in their own back yard.
Even if Denver and Aurora just can’t get it together to come up with something more practical than wheelchairs on a crowded escalator, they can work to move the bus line one or two blocks off of Colfax, create more limited bus lines or just dance in the street, hoping for a miracle. But Denver must realize the times have drastically changed. It’s not their street. It’s not their money. It’s not their call.
Reach Editor Dave Perry at 303-750-7555 or dperry@aurorasentinel.com
Looking at the city’s traffic count along E Colfax, 31K – 34K mostly single occupancy vehicles, compared to 22K people using the bus, it seems that dedicating a lane to move the most people makes sense. If the city were to share the lane with higher occupancy vehicles (HOV), efficiency could improve on E Colfax dramatically. Right now E Colfax is a disaster with SOVs only staying on Colfax for a few blocks and using alternates like 17th and 13th for longer trips. A dedicated HOV / BUS lane from Anschutz to downtown makes sense to this old fart.
Here’s a better idea. There is obvious demand, allow free market enterprise to compete for passengers. We know that governments are horribly incapable of running businesses, so why are they running this? A free market system won’t cost the city one red cent and will bring in millions in revenue.
Ha. That’s funny. Most of the time a business won’t set up shop and operate anything for a city unless it gets a tax break and the government shells out the $ for infrastructure. So, actually it DOES cost more money.
I shouldn’t really say this even though it is so obvious. I get relief from Colfax using 14th Av or 17th Av across Aurora to downtown Denver. There is always only a small flow of traffic with one man in a vehicle, I think one of those avenues could be used just for a bus system. The author here touches on that, but does not develop it.