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Honk if You Hate Driving in Boulder
When my son was preparing to earn his driver’s license two years ago, he attended driving school in Broomfield. The instructor said some of the behind-the-wheel instruction the students would undergo would take place in Boulder. He said if you can drive safely in Boulder, you can drive safely anywhere in Colorado.
Some young drivers give over the wheel when they hit Boulder city limits. “My son is an inexperienced driver and won’t even drive in Boulder—it’s too scary for him,” says Lynne Corine, who lives in eastern Boulder County. “He’ll pull into some parking lot and say, ‘Mom, you need to drive.’”
It’s all the pedestrian crosswalks on main thoroughfares, the roundabouts, the quick stoplights, the bike lanes, bus lanes, must-turn lanes and the streets with not enough lanes that make Boulder the trickiest town in the state when it comes to driving.
Honk if you know what I’m talking about.
HMM. IS THE WORD ‘IRRITATING’ OR ‘NIGHTMARE’?
Trina Soileau knows from bad traffic. She moved to Boulder in 2003 from Houston, Texas, a metropolis whose traffic she describes with words like “horrible” and “nightmare” and “standstill.” Boulder traffic scores in the lighter category she calls “irritating” and “inconvenient.” But she wonders if she might have to adjust her terminology in the future. “I think there’s a lot of traffic in Boulder for a small infrastructure,” Soileau says. “I wonder if it’s going to be a problem soon. It seems like the city might not be able to hold all the traffic at some point. It’s not built that way.”
She’s on to something. Something city transportation planners have been on to for decades. Boulder officials adopted the city’s first Transportation Master Plan in 1989, and have updated it three times since. A 32-page progress report released earlier this year details the city’s strategies for keeping Boulder from turning into a little Houston. It’s a mash-up of policies that include traffic-light synching based on traffic-pattern studies; pedestrian and bikeway improvements; emphasis on public transit of the Hop, Skip and Jump variety; and turning as many streets as possible into multimodal travelways called “complete streets.”
According to Mike Sweeney, the city’s transportation, planning and operations coordinator, simply adding car lanes or building more streets won’t lessen vehicle traffic. It could actually increase it, as drivers would be enticed to use them more, he says. “You don’t want to pave Paradise,” Sweeney adds. “Even if you did … you probably wouldn’t like the town that you created.”
It’s true, we don’t want Boulder to turn into Thornton. (Sorry, Thornton).
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The slow but steady urging of people out of their cars has netted results, and more than two dozen state and national awards for the city’s transportation department. The most recent data, collected in 2009, show that heavy congestion along four main corridors — Broadway and 28th Street north and south; Edgewood/Valmont and Arapahoe avenues east and west — is about the same as it was in 1994, Sweeney says. And the TMP progress report also shows that, as a percentage of population, a lot of people in Boulder get to and from work on a bus (9.8 percent), on a bike (12.3) or on foot (9.7).
That’s pretty awesome. Unless your work requires that you carry tools, or you need to make quick lunchtime errands, or you have children you must shuttle to school, soccer practice and piano lessons, or if you don’t care to ride a bike. (It’s true, there are those among us who don’t care to ride bikes. And for now, that’s not a fineable offense in Boulder.) And then there’s the housing issue. Many who make up Boulder’s workforce can’t afford to live in the city, and must travel in and out of Boulder each workday. The commute is so trying at certain times of day that drivers traveling the Diagonal Highway on the north side, or U.S. 36 on the south, may qualify for federally subsidized relaxation sessions under the new Affordable Health Care for America Act. (Ha ha, just joking.)
Speaking of clogged arteries, between 1990 and 2010, the city completed 31 major infrastructure projects designed to improve various modes of transportation. That’s more than one-and-a-half major traffic-inconvenience areas a year. And this may get to the heart of the Boulder driver’s dilemma. In part, it’s the endless cone-zone construction that makes Boulder drivers want to slam on their brakes and run screaming into the nearest Open Space. We’re so busy improving the avenues we use to get around town that it gets in the way of getting around town.
But that’s probably just the cost of living here. And it’s something Boulder drivers will have to continue to put up with. Barring wild cards like sudden and significant changes in global energy sources that force us out of our cars, the thumbnail theme of Boulder’s TMP is ... more of the same.
“What the master plan envisions is that we continue to invest, like we have been the past 20 years, in trying to complete the other transportation systems,” Sweeney says. While the car will still own the Boulder road in 2037, the plan is to hold the number of passenger cars about where it is now. The future is about choices, he adds: “You can ride a bicycle, and do that safely, and you can walk, and the bus is a good option.”
So my advice for my son? Get used to it or get a bike.
Mark Collins lives and drives in Boulder. He doesn’t own a bike.
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