DENVER, Colo. — Residents in the East Colfax neighborhood woke up to a confusing surprise on Wednesday.
“I figured [it] out when I drove down the street and saw someone coming at me,” said longtime resident Monique Helstrom.
That’s when Helstrom, president of the East Colfax Neighborhood Association, realized that East 14th Avenue had turned from a one-way to a two-way road in the middle of the day.
No advance notice from the city, she said — just cones, broken signs, and lots of confusion.
“There was a lot of incoming traffic, there was a lot of turning, there was a lot of not knowing what to do,” she continued.
The City of Denver had plans for some time now to turn East 13th and 14th Avenues from Quebec to Yosemite into two-way streets to reduce speeding in the East Colfax neighborhood.
Speed data captured from April to October 2023 found most drivers on these streets were traveling at greater than 40 miles an hour, while the speed limit was posted at 30 mph.
It’s a solution neighbors have been wanting for a while, but according to Helstrom, the rollout could have been better.
“For the last, I want to say, two weeks, the only reader board signs on the Quebec side and the Yosemite side said, ‘new traffic pattern coming soon’. That was it. Not ‘two-way’. No date — just ‘new traffic pattern’,” she said.
Denver District 8 Councilwoman Shontel M. Lewis took to social media on Wednesday afternoon to let residents know about the change, telling Denver7 she found out about the conversion at the same time neighbors did.
“This was a safety measure, and in poorly executing a safety measure, we then created unsafe conditions,” Lewis said.
Denver7 took these concerns to the Denver Department of Transportation and Infrastructure (DOTI).
“We realize there was more we could have done, and should have done, to communicate with the adjacent neighborhoods and are going to work on making sure we do better in the future,” a DOTI spokesperson said. “We did this rollout and conversion to two-way in fairly rapid fashion – over the course of just a couple of days. And so we recognize it may have been confusing to people at first. That said, DOTI staff have been driving the corridors today and it appears that drivers are understanding and following the new configuration pretty well.”
Denver7 observed city crews installing permanent signage going up on both roads on Friday morning, further alleviating some of the days-long confusion.
“See how everybody's driving slow? It's already working. It's already working,” Vince Saaverdra told us as he put up the signs.
DOTI said cones will remain in the center line on both corridors for some time to help make the new two-way configuration more obvious to drivers.
All-way stops will be installed on 13th and 14th avenues at Uinta and Willow streets as part of the city's traffic calming efforts in the neighborhood.
The speed limit on both streets has also been reduced to 25 mph as part of the new traffic configuration.
