Advocacy work does not usually result in quick wins.
In our last blog on Grandview, we declared a victory for getting CU to hire Toole Design – an engineering firm with expertise in bike/ped safety – to look at the Broadway/Grandview intersection and suggest the safest design. We still haven’t seen the exact scope of the work other than Toole “will be paying particular attention to the intersection of Grandview Avenue and Broadway and Grandview Avenue between Broadway and 13th Street.” We are continuing to watchdog this work and hopefully Toole will recommend modifications to University, allowing the most dangerous turning movement, the left turn into Grandview off of southbound Broadway, to be closed.
The City of Boulder approved the Limelight Hotel & Conference Center permits for the slightly modified Broadway & Grandview intersection. After three Traffic Studies, the last one finally included a Crash Analysis that showed that there were zero crashes at this intersection in the past. By code, when a Crash Analysis is performed, the potential for future crashes must be considered. However this was not done because when you have zero crashes, you can’t extrapolate an estimated quantity of crashes when the volume of traffic (mostly out of towners) goes up 16 times. Sixteen times zero is still zero, even though the risk is higher. This is not a Vision Zero principle.
The silver lining right now is Council directed staff to enhance the wording in the Design Construction Standards Crash Analysis section based on our suggestion. We are confident staff will take into account vision zero principles, and expect a draft in April.
See the Grandview history in this blog.