With Bike Lanes a Reality, What's Next for the Colorado Blvd. Vision Plan?

As the steering committee of "Take Back the Boulevard" is getting ready for its launch party on Sunday where it will unveil the full Colorado Boulevard Vision Plan, several members took the time to talk to Eagle Rock Patch recently about what might be coming next. 

Bike lanes, which will reduce traffic from six lanes to four on Colorado in Eagle Rock, are scheduled to be completed by Oct. 4, as are several new crosswalks. But the plan has many initiatives that have yet to happen, and TBTB is looking to find funding to make the rest of the vision a reality.

"We’re ultimately opportunist about which initiatives get tackled next," said Alan Compton, a landscape architect and TBTB steering committee member. "The opportunist angle comes from where funding is available. We may have a laundry list of things we’d like to see done first, but if funding is available for item four first, we’re going to go for that."

TBTB is a community organization formed over two years ago with the goal of making Colorado Boulevard safer for cars and more friendly to pedestrians and bikers. One of TBTB's top priorities from the vision plan is the addition of medians on Colorado west of Eagle Rock Boulevard.

"We have a remarkable set of medians on the eastern side of Colorado Boulevard, and when you go west, it’s bare," Compton said. "And I think that the character of that stretch of Colorado is so radically different. My hope is that we can find funding to get planted medians on that western stretch... It’s a raceway. There’s just over 100 feet between the curbs and no median."

The medians would help accomplish one of TBTB's main goals, which is to slow down traffic on the "highway" that Colorado Boulevard had become and turn it into a "main street."

"I think the ability to help create some scale in that space, because it’s so vast, will change it’s character," Compton said. "And it’s a little bit of, if you build it they will come. And I think if you change the character of that, I think we will see the commercial areas increase as well."

Another issue the plan addresses is parking problems.

"One of the things that continually came up at our meetings that you can often see if you go out and observe Colorado Boulevard is a lot of business activity on the south side of the street," said Jeff Jacobberger, a planning and land use consultant and steering committee member. "And the parking on the south side of the street will be chock full, while parking on the north side of the street is completely empty or almost empty."

With less auto traffic on Colorado moving slower, and with more visible cross walks, people will be far more likely to park on one side of Colorado to visit a business on the other side, Jacobberger said.

"So we’re moving a travel lane and adding bike lanes and adding crosswalks, and converting the marked cross walks to what are called continental cross walks—high visibility crosswalks—which are all really intended to make it easier to park on one side of the street and get to a destination on the other side of the street," Jacobberger said. "We really believe that will go a long way to solving the parking issue. It’s not a genuine shortage of parking, it’s shortage of parking that people feel safe and comfortable walking to."

Another way to alleviate parking problems that the plan addresses is changing some of the street cleaning times.

A proposal in the plan states:

Modify the street cleaning schedule so that on-street parking is not restricted during mid-day periods of peak demand. Instead of sweeping streets between 11am and 1pm, sweep streets earlier in the morning, such as from 8am to 10am.

The plan does state that changing the Bureau of Street Services schedule is difficult, but that it "would bring a much desired increase in parking supply at peak periods."

Improved parking and medians are just several of the plan's initiatives. To learn more about the Colorado Boulevard Vision Plan, click here at this link to download the full plan or attend the Colorado Boulevard Vision Plan Launch Party on Sunday.