An AI generated image of just how weird traffic-calming jungles might become.
Driving in Aurora and the nether regions demands steely focus, cunning and plenty of foul language.
Those are the rules. Navigating anywhere near the Town Center at Aurora mall, especially during rush hour, requires instincts like Kreskin and expert use of the F-bomb.
At any moment, you must be prepared to take your Pontiac Vibe from 0 to 50 mph in a blink and inject it into the auto chain that never breaks a link on Abilene Street as it approaches East Mississippi Avenue.
While I realize that grueling traffic is just a way of life in Aurora, and the smoggy city downstream the Cherry Creek, I find it much more satisfying to blame the river of idiot drivers, whom I draw like a magnet.
I’m referring to the timid twits too afraid to do half the speed limit on wide, empty roads and make it impossible to get around them. I’m talking about jerks who recklessly slingshot right into your rear-view mirror at 120 mph on I-225, incinerating you with 14 halogen lights, as if they’re from a UFO, and then hang there at anal-probing distance until you relent and give up the fast lane to drive behind a smoking 1991 GEO Prizm with no back window.
In Aurora, you must have hair-trigger reflexes behind the wheel, ready at a split-second’s notice to steer clear of a couch on the highway, a Lexus piloted by something with a lot of hair and a lot of mobile phone, or the inevitable yahoo that pulls lightning fast right in front of you on Parker Road and then proceeds at 13 miles per hour until you nearly black out from breathless cursing.
Oh, the humanity.
But nothing in Aurora has heightened my reflexes as has the growing number of “traffic calming” devices implanted like upside-down asphalt land mines all over the metroplex.
You’ve seen these things for sure. They look like a failed garage sale in the middle of the road. Or maybe some kind of croquet game for extra-tall third-graders abandonded in the middle of the street.
Road “experts” swear they make Aurora streets safer because you see the visual clutter and slow down, to nearly a crawl, to navigate concrete curbs, pylons, partitions and poles, poles, poles.
What actually happens at these places, hilariously sometimes built on hills, is that two cars come to a stand-off predicament. They both slam on the brakes, risking a rear-ending, or the drivers close their eyes and just hopes the thing that looks like a fallen bicycle or abandoned stroller in the middle of the traffic-calming calamity creation really isn’t.
Likewise, as is always the way in Colorado, rather than create real bike lanes for real bikes, cities across the metroplex have “painted” confusing bike lanes on the right side of the road and into right-turn lanes. The “logic” freaks out drivers who care enough to obey the rules, and risk the lives of anyone desperate enough to drive on suburban streets with faux bike lanes.
It’s too much excitement for a twice-daily commuter.
Between white-knuckle and clenched jaw drama on every interstate every day as the Drag Race 2024 Weave Team careens around all of us, and the endless Swervy Derby drivers with their faces in their cell phones, it all seems like an underhanded ploy to get all of us to reconsider RTD, or work from home.
So how much is a monthly bus pass?
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So now this traffic situation is apparent to someone that sees, feels, and taste what the result of high density leads to. This is good. The payoff of the traffic debacle Dave Perry complains about and one he notes as unacceptable is he gets to directly partake in the high density, squeeze more people in per square foot thought process. Perry is one that feels that the lawmakers, both state and local should make housing their first priority, and everything will be fine. Well, Mr. Perry you push hard for voting for the candidates that are willing to make a platform to compress more people into what little and is left. The coming ADU units, in the neighborhoods for example. Heavily promoted by the geniuses downtown and Gov. Polis. You think driving in Aurora is discouraging wait till these units get set into the neighborhoods. These road experts can’t fix what reflects the basic problem, lacking the proper mentality that caused it.