Opinion: Why Boulder’s grand schemes don’t work
Last week, after getting my workout biking up Lee Hill Road, I checked out the alternatives to Iris for biking between Broadway and Folsom. I rode east on Kalmia and Linden (north of Iris), and then west on Hawthorne and Grape (south of Iris). I saw only four moving vehicles, total, in the 2-plus miles of neighborhood streets. Thanks to council member Lisa Morzel for pointing out these routes and for bringing the “right-sizing” discussion back up. I’ve also ridden the multi-use path along 63rd Street multiple times. These alternate routes make “right-sizing” irrelevant for both Iris and 63rd as far as bike safety goes, so why were these alternates ignored? I believe that an important reason is because the focus was on an abstract concept — this grand scheme called “right-sizing” — rather than on the needs and issues of the specific situations. Other similarly overly-broad grand schemes include Housing Boulder, Design Excellence, the Civic Center redesign, Envision East Arapahoe...