Hilltop Is Bracing for the Wrong Moment on Colorado Boulevard
September 10, 2026
September 10, 2026
On the night of April 29, more than a hundred Hilltop residents filled a room at Graland Country Day School to hear Colorado Department of Transportation staff walk through renderings of a rebuilt Colorado Boulevard. By the end of the evening, the Hilltop Neighborhood Association took an informal show of hands. All but eight people in that room favored leaving the road exactly as it is.
That vote tells you how people feel. It does not tell you what actually happens next, and the gap between those two things is worth understanding if you live anywhere near this corridor. Most of the anxiety circulating in Hilltop right now is aimed at a moment that is still years away. The moment that actually matters, the one that decides what your commute and your side streets look like, is happening quietly, right now, with far less attention than the straw poll got.
Ask a Hilltop resident what worries them about this project and you will hear some version of Colfax Avenue: years of orange barrels, single-lane detours, businesses struggling through construction dust. That fear is reasonable. It is also premature. CDOT's own project materials, shared at the HNA's April meeting, put a construction start no earlier than 2030, four years out, and even that date carries the caveat "if possible." Nobody is digging up your block this year.
What is happening this year, and what the straw poll and the position papers are actually reacting to, is the selection of a Locally Preferred Alternative, the specific design CDOT and its partners will carry into engineering. That decision was targeted for summer 2026. Summer just ended. As of the most recent public materials available, no alternative had been formally announced, which means one of two things is true: the decision has already been made and hasn't been publicized yet, or it has slipped, and the window to weigh in is still open. Either way, this is the moment with actual leverage, not the eventual ribbon-cutting.
CDOT has published detailed performance modeling for two of the three design options under consideration, and the numbers explain why the room at Graland reacted the way it did.
| Alternative | How buses run | Transit speed gain vs. no-build | Vehicle travel time | Estimated cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mixed Flow | Buses share existing lanes with regular traffic | Up to 25% faster | About 5% longer | $200–250 million |
| Side Running | Buses get a dedicated curb lane; two through lanes remain for cars, with right turns crossing the bus lane | Up to 30% faster | Up to 1.4 times longer | Not yet published |
A third option, full center-running dedicated lanes down the middle of the road, similar to what is currently under construction on Colfax, remains on the table. CDOT has not released matching performance figures for it in the materials shared locally, but it is the design transit advocates, including the Denver Streets Partnership, have pushed hardest for in public comment.
Look at that middle column and the appeal of Mixed Flow becomes obvious: a modest 5% increase in driving time is a very different ask than 1.4 times longer. But Mixed Flow is also the option that does the least to fix the actual problem CDOT says it is solving, which is a corridor where nearly 3,000 riders a day already use buses that get stuck in the same traffic as everyone else.
Colorado Boulevard isn't a corridor Hilltop watches from a distance. It's the neighborhood's western edge, the road most residents use to reach Cherry Creek, I-70, downtown, and everything south. Any change to lane counts or turn restrictions on Colorado Boulevard doesn't stay on Colorado Boulevard. It shows up on the streets behind it.
That's the specific worry the HNA has raised in its own communications: that reducing general travel lanes for a dedicated bus lane, particularly under the Side Running or Center Running alternatives, could push commuters looking to avoid backups onto Monaco Parkway and Holly Street, both of which carry real foot traffic from families walking to Steck Elementary and Graland Country Day School each morning. Those two schools sit inside the residential grid in a way that makes a walk-to-school culture possible on a normal day. A meaningful shift in cut-through traffic changes that math.
Michael Atkins, the HNA's vice president, has been the most visible voice trying to hold two ideas at once in public meetings: that the boulevard genuinely needs fixing, and that the specific fix matters enormously to the people who live one block off it. It's a harder position to hold than pure opposition or pure advocacy, and it's the one that actually reflects what most residents seem to want, which is real input into which alternative gets chosen, not a rubber stamp on whichever option CDOT prefers.
The HNA didn't stop at a straw poll. In June, the board released a formal position paper opposing the project in its current form, built on two arguments: that the plan leans on bus infrastructure while leaving dedicated bicycle infrastructure and safe sidewalk buffers largely unaddressed, and that travel patterns on Colorado Boulevard, a mix of through-traffic and multi-stop errands, don't fit neatly into a fixed-route bus model.
That position sits in real tension with the case CDOT is making for change in the first place. Colorado Boulevard is part of Denver's High Injury Network, with 117 crashes resulting in death or serious injury recorded along the corridor between 2018 and 2022. There is roughly a mile of missing sidewalk and another four miles that don't meet ADA standards. CDOT projects the population along the corridor to grow 52% by 2050, and its stated goal is to roughly double transit ridership to about 2 million riders a year. Those are the numbers advocates point to when they argue that incremental fixes won't hold up.
Both sides are working from real data. The disagreement isn't over whether Colorado Boulevard has problems. It's over which of the three alternatives solves them without simply relocating the traffic to Hilltop's own streets.
Public attention to this project has been building, but unevenly. CDOT's first open house, in September 2024, drew about 170 attendees and 192 written comments. Its second, in May 2026 at the Clayton Early Learning Center, drew roughly 300. That's real growth in engagement, but it's concentrated in a handful of evenings scattered across nearly two years, which is exactly why a decision targeted for summer 2026 can slip past most residents without notice. There's no ribbon, no groundbreaking, no visible sign that anything happened at all.
For context on how these timelines actually move, CDOT's parallel Federal Boulevard BRT project, working through a similar review process, is already penciled in for a 2027 construction start, three years ahead of Colorado Boulevard's earliest target. Colorado Boulevard is, by CDOT's own accounting, the slower-moving of the two. That's not necessarily bad news. It means the alternative-selection stage, the part that actually determines whether your street becomes a bypass route, is still the live conversation.
A few concrete ways to stay ahead of a decision that may already be close to final:
Understanding exactly what's moving on a street corner, and what isn't, is the kind of granular local read that matters well beyond this particular project. It's also the standard Mckinze Casey holds herself to for every Hilltop client, whether the question on the table is a transit corridor or the value of a home two blocks off it. If you're weighing a move in this neighborhood and want a clear-eyed read on what's actually changing here, not just what people assume is changing, request a private consultation.
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