Cruising the New Colorado Boulevard: What Do You Think?

After several years of theoretical discussions, diagrams, drawings and debate, Eagle Rockers have now actually seen the bike lanes on Colorado Boulevard since their installation began last week.

Now that you can lay eyes on them, what do you think? Are they slowing down the traffic to safer levels? Are they slowing traffic down too much ? Are you biking in the bike lanes? 

To help spark some discussion, I will share what I thought on Tuesday afternoon after fully cruising Colorado Boulevard for the first time since the bike lanes—and a whole lot of red curbs—have been added to significant portions. My experience was that it made me slow down and watch the road a lot closer. Whether this is good or bad I will leave to our readers, but that was my feeling. 

The addition of the bike lanes was very noticeable because it is not just simple bike lanes that have been installed. There are additional crosswalks, bike turn lanes, solid white lines, dashed white lines and many diagonal white lines in some areas separating the bike lanes from the auto lanes by a few feet. It's a visual bombardment of lines, lines, lines that in the end made me snap into focus, slow down and pay more attention to the road. Traffic seemed to be moving along fine without any jams. 

I must also note this: I wanted to stop a biker and ask them what they thought of the bike lanes, but there weren't any. I cruised the full length from one end of Eagle Rock to the other twice, but there were no bikers to be found using the lanes.