A Safer Intersection at Broadway and Grandview is in Sight. Thanks to your Help!

As most of you know, we have been fighting a dangerous intersection design at Broadway & Grandview that is being built in conjunction with the new CU Conference Center. It will increase cars crossing over the Broadway bike path from 70 a day to 1150 a day.

This has been a long, hard fight made more difficult by the fact that as a state entity, CU doesn’t have to follow the same development rules.  As a state entity, there is little opportunity for review or comment on the dangerous design, making the roadway design standards essentially lower for anything CU builds. We just lobbied for – and won – an ordinance change to try to prevent that in the future.

CU / Limelight (the Aspen Skiing Company Hotel that is a partner with CU in this development) had submitted a traffic study done by a firm from Chicago. This firm did an additional two updates to respond to requests from the city and Community Cycles, but the study continued to fall short, not even mentioning bikes and peds until the third submission and containing significant engineering errors that Community Cycles has continued to point out.

Our request for the last month has been to have Toole Design – an engineering firm with expertise in bike/ped safety –  look at this intersection and suggest the safest design. We took every member of City Council out to this intersection to show them our concerns and continued to press Council and city staff to motivate CU to have Toole evaluate these plans, assess whether they will result in a safe design, and recommend alternatives if not.

A few weeks ago, City Council members brought this up at a regularly scheduled meeting with the CU Chancellor. At that meeting the Chancellor and CU staff agreed to work with the city to have Toole look at the intersection.  We have been reaching out to CU to get confirmation — from them, in writing – that they would be having Toole look at the intersection. We received that confirmation Friday night!

This is not the end of this battle, but is significant and encouraging progress. Community Cycles will still need to watchdog the process, work with everyone involved to make sure we get the safest design possible and then work hard to ensure they build the intersection to the agreed upon design.  But at this point we are hopeful and feel much better about the future of the Broadway / Grandview intersection.

We could not have done this without your support – signing the petition, sending letters to CU and City Council, becoming a member of Community Cycles to show you support safer places to walk and ride, and donating to help fund this time consuming and detailed work.

Thank you so much! Without your support, this work is simply not possible.

THIS VICTORY IS YOUR VICTORY!

More information and a summary of Community Cycles’ work on the Broadway/ Grandview intersection, roughly in chronological order from oldest to newest:

• First letter to TAB alerting them to the dangers of the proposed intersection

• Community Cycles’ first letter to staff, council and CU suggesting changes to make the Broadway / Grandview intersection safer

• Summary of meeting of Community Cycles and city staff and Community Cycles memo to city staff regarding errors in CU’s Traffic Study

• Guest opinion: CCAC member Martha Roskowski: Plan for CU conference center may pose risk to bicyclists, pedestrians

• Will Boulder City Council Help Avoid Carnage on the Broadway Bike Path? Community Cycles Op-ed Boulder Daily Camera

• Advocacy Alert asking the public to sign the petition for a safe Broadway Grandview intersection

• You-tube video of intersection: Limelight’s Plan for Grandview- the Opposite of Vision Zero

• End Traffic Violence Now- website dedicated to “CU’s Dangerous Design for the Grandview- Broadway Intersection

• Save Vision Zero: Request for letters from the public to City Council and CU/ Limelight

• Community Cycles Successfully Lobbies for Changes in Roadway Standards