The Colorado Boulevard bus rapid transit project is slated to stretch 7 miles if it’s built — and right in the middle of that span sits the city of Glendale.
The community of 4,500, which is completely surrounded by Denver, is feeling squeezed by the transit-oriented proposal.
Earlier this month, Glendale’s City Council passed a resolution urging the “no-build” option for the project. The resolution states that the traffic impacts on drivers from eliminating general-purpose vehicle lanes and turning them into bus-only lanes “significantly outweigh the meager forecasted increases in bus travel times and ridership.”
A revamp of the road, which sees nearly 50,000 vehicle trips per day in Glendale, could also eliminate several left turns that provide critical access to the city for southbound traffic, said Glendale City Manager Chuck Line, including to businesses that rely on the arterial to bring them a steady flow of customers.
“It’s a lot of money for very little benefit,” Line said of the project. “You’re taking away road capacity and you’re taking away left turns. This would have a massive impact on Glendale.”
Glendale’s strong opposition joined other input voiced on the potential project this month. The Colorado Department of Transportation that drew about 300 people, according to Westword. The small city’s leaders are voicing the shared frustration of drivers who already deal with a clogged Colorado Boulevard — while transit advocates hope for a project that will reorient the thoroughfare to serve more people using public transportation.
The proposed Colorado Boulevard rapid bus line is one in an expanding number of projects of its kind in metro Denver, either in the planning stages or under construction. A stretch of Federal Boulevard is due for similar treatment to Colorado Boulevard, while between Boulder and Longmont is partially complete.
Construction on the $280 million East Colfax BRT project crossed from Denver into Aurora this month for the first time.
Bus rapid transit comes in different flavors, but at its core it’s designed to make buses run like trains. That could mean higher frequencies, dedicated lanes or preferential signalization for buses, more comfortable and technologically advanced stations, and level boarding for quicker step-ons and -offs.
CDOT, which is in charge of the Colorado Boulevard project since the arterial is a state highway, is in the early stages of , which will stretch from East 40th Avenue to East Yale Avenue. The bulk of the project would run through east Denver, with about 1 mile of the corridor located in Glendale.
CDOT’s projections say that building the most robust form of BRT on Colorado Boulevard — either by dedicating a center lane or a side lane for exclusive bus use — would shorten the projected 45-minute bus ride in 2045 by 30% to 35%. Daily bus ridership, CDOT estimates, would leap from around 2,800 today to 6,000 a day in that time.
But to achieve those improvements in transit travel times would require turning a car lane into a bus lane in each direction. And that’s where the trade-off comes in.
CDOT projects that a center-running bus lane design would come with double the vehicle travel times on Colorado Boulevard by 2045, while a side-running design would boost vehicle travel times by nearly 50%.
“They’re taking it from a three-lane road to a two-lane road (in each direction),” Line said. “You’re going to double travel time for 30,000 people on southbound Colorado Boulevard for 3,000 additional bus riders?”
Jill Locantore, executive director of the transit-friendly organization Denver Streets Partnership, said it’s time to have more than just a conversation about a famously crowded corridor on Denver’s east side.
“We’ve spent decades widening Colorado Boulevard, and that has proven to be a failed strategy,” she said. “We can’t build our way out of congestion.”
She urges CDOT to embrace an alternative that includes a dedicated bus lane — an “essential ingredient” in getting people on the bus.
“Making the bus fast, frequent and reliable — that’s how people really start using transit,” Locantore said.
CDOT appeared to be backing away from the center-running alternative already, with spokeswoman Tamara Rollison telling The Denver Post last week that the agency had concerns about “unacceptable traffic impacts, higher construction impacts and costs” from that design.
There is a third alternative, called mixed-flow traffic, which would keep intact the six throughlanes on Colorado Boulevard while giving buses signal prioritization for faster progress.
“But no decisions have been made,” Rollison said.
Line, Glendale’s city manager, is also worried about what a more congested Colorado Boulevard could do to the performance of intersecting streets, like East Alameda and East Mississippi avenues. And if things get too crunched on Colorado, he asked, would drivers choose neighborhood streets in both Denver and Glendale as alternate routes?
“They’re going to be driving through Virginia Village, they’re going to be driving through Hilltop,” he said of two adjacent Denver neighborhoods.
That worries Courtney Mamuscia, the president of the Hilltop Neighborhood Association, which lies just north of Glendale. She could see Holly, Dahlia and Clermont streets becoming pass-through routes for impatient motorists tired of staring at brake lights on Colorado Boulevard.
“The neighborhood is deeply skeptical (of CDOT’s plans),” she said. “Lane reductions that will divert thousands of vehicles into our neighborhood is a big concern.”
