Tara Cloe has lived near Federal Boulevard and West Colfax Avenue for 13 years and if she needs to cross that intersection while walking — she doesn’t.
Cloe, like many of the neighborhood’s residents, will walk out of her way to avoid the intersection. It’s a highway-style, cloverleaf interchange that the surrounding community says is unsafe for pedestrian and bikers, and also lacks the traffic flow to justify its existence.
, a community initiative led by the West Colfax Business Improvement District, is designing plans to redevelop the intersection, aiming to make it safer and activate the 29 acres currently occupied by the interchange.
To raise the profile of their initiative, the group closed down one of the exchanges that connects eastbound Colfax with southbound Federal and held a pop-up festival. Musicians played on a stage, locals sold food and neighbors walked through a tent showcasing different ideas for the intersection, voting on the ones they liked the best. The group also set up mock intersections to show what the area could look like someday.
“You can see what’s going on right here,” Cloe said, gesturing to the mini-festival. “You got to do something with this.”
There are two main issues with the interchange, said Anne Kuechenmeister, a consultant with Michael Baker International whose part of the initiative: Safety and connectivity.
Federal Boulevard is the most dangerous road for pedestrians in the state, according to Walk Denver. Twenty-one people have been killed while walking on Federal Boulevard since 2012, seven of them in 2017. The area near the Colfax Avenue intersection has seen the most pedestrian and bicyclist injuries and fatalities when compared to other stretches of the road, according to the group.
Cars move through the interchange at high speeds and typically aren’t paying attention to pedestrians, Kuechenmeister said. Trying to cross the intersection, whether you’re going from the bus stop to Mile High Stadium or to the library, is also difficult, she said.
West Colfax Business Improvement District Director Dan Shah said the group is working for both immediate improvements to the area and long-term redevelopment.
Potential short-term solutions included putting in a raised sidewalk, similar to a speed hump, that would cause cars to slow down, as well as blinking pedestrian signs for when people are crossing, he said. The group created a mock crosswalk for people to use and asked them for feedback.
The next step is longterm. For nearly a year and a half, the group has been working with neighbors to find out what they want to happen to the intersection and designing potential plans, Shah said.
One idea involves demolishing the bridge where Federal Boulevard goes over Colfax and leveling the two roads. Another involves turning the bridge into a one-way street with bike lanes and wider sidewalks. In that scenario, another one-way street for opposite traffic would be added next to Mile High Stadium.
Neighbors were also deciding what they’d like to see if the 29 acres were freed up. People voted for either a community corridor, community center or residences.
Both Colfax and Federal are state highways owned by the Colorado Department of Transportation.
“We are absolutely as an agency open (to the idea) and have started thinking about how we reimagine the Federal and Colfax interchange,” CDOT spokeswoman Amy Ford said.
She said the agency started mulling over a variety of potential designs a year or two ago and appreciate the efforts being done by Over the Colfax Clover. Reconfiguring the interchange would require a significant amount of money, though, so the agency (and Over the Colfax Clover) is looking into a public-private partnership to help foot the bill.
The initiative started after West Colfax BID received a grant from the Colorado Health Foundation to improve on the Lakewood Gulch bike trail, Shah said. From there, he said the group started thinking about how it can improve broader connectivity between the West Colfax and Sun Valley neighborhoods.
The initiative is still in its starting phases. Kuechenmeister guessed that it would take 10 to 20 years for a redevelopment to come to fruition, allowing time to garner the funding, raise political will and add the idea to local and state planning documents.