Wash Park West Residents Want to Pump the Breaks on Traffic Circles

Residents of West Washington Park are angry with Denver city planners after the installation of traffic circles in their neighborhood. People who live there say they were given an inadequate heads-up by the Denver Department of Transportation & Infrastructure, and they want city officials to hit the brakes.

“We’re fighting back for this little corner of the world, because it’s completely ridiculous,” says Eric Devansky, a Wash Park West resident for eight years. “We just want to press pause on this.”

On November 4, DOTI began installing five traffic circles, also known as roundabouts, to create a new neighborhood bikeway along East Dakota Avenue that connects Broadway and South Marion Street. According to the city, a neighborhood bikeway is a street equipped with traffic-slowing efforts, like bike lanes and speed bumps, to make sharing the road safer for cyclists.

Traffic circles “create a slower and safer experience for everyone using the corridor” when they’re coupled with other traffic calming measures, says DOTI, which finished installing traffic circles for a bikeway along Emerson Street in Capitol Hill on November 3.

When completed, the Wash Park West traffic circles will be the same standard asphalt circles seen throughout the city. DOTI expects them to be finished by December 5; more traffic circles on South Sherman Street, which will intersect with the East Dakota Avenue bikeway, are on the same construction schedule.

So far, the city has installed signs along East Dakota Avenue alerting people of the work, with paint outlining where the new traffic circles will be.

Some Wash Park West residents say they were caught off-guard when they discovered small papers describing the project taped to their doors by the city in September; others learned of the traffic circles by word of mouth.

“I had heard nothing about this project, neither my wife nor I, until a rickety sign went up and they painted up the streets,” Devansky says. “There seems to be zero transparency in this process.”

According to DOTI spokesperson Nancy Kuhn, the idea for a bikeway and traffic circles came from feedback collected from “public meetings, online surveys, interactive input maps and public comments.” The feedback consisted of over 300 community responses collected from April to August in 2020, according to Kuhn.

The Wash Park West construction is funded by the city’s RISE Denver bond, approved by voters in 2021. Along with the South Sherman Street bikeway, it was on the Denver Move: Bikes Map published in June after the city gathered input on a draft of the map from August to September of last year.

Denver Bike Lobby founder Rob Toftness blasted DOTI over its removal of downtown flex posts in the spring, but he’s on board with the traffic circles.

“Neighborhood traffic circles succeed in calming traffic,” Toftness says. “With Denver leaning in so heavily to what they call neighborhood bikeways, calmer traffic on these routes is a necessity for cyclist and pedestrian safety. Traffic circles can’t really do it alone, though, and need to be paired with other solutions, like speed humps.”

Toftness also recommends “diverters,” a catch-all for objects that can separate bike lanes from cars, such as flex posts.

Mike Thomas, a 27-year resident of Wash Park West, learned about the upcoming project in July through a newsletter; he vaguely remembered taking the survey behind it half a decade ago.

“I think I told them one street over another,” Thomas recalls. “But that’s really the last I heard of it. Then they made their design plan in 2022, and I didn’t answer any surveys for that. The first I learned that anything was going to be constructed was July this year. …I think, by then, [DOTI] had already decided they were going to go ahead with it.”

Over the last five years, three neighborhood bikeways have been installed in Wash Park West along East Exposition and East Kentucky avenues and South Pearl Street. Thomas, who considers himself an avid cyclist, says the existing bikeways in his neighborhood aren’t safe and don’t see much use. He “doesn’t see the point” of adding a fourth bikeway a half-block from where he lives near South Pennsylvania Street and East Dakota, he adds, and is “disappointed” with how the city made the decision to move forward.

“I’d like to see the city reach out more often about these things, share what they’re doing, and make sure they’re getting feedback all along,” he says. “Not just relying on something they did five years ago and expecting those things to be the same.”

Pat Wagner, who has lived near East Dakota and South Pennsylvania for 41 years, discovered traffic circles were coming when she found a piece of paper taped to her door a few months ago.

“I was running errands, and found a little third-of-a-sheet of typing paper that was taped to my door with teeny, tiny type” describing the traffic circles, Wagner says. “The truth is, if I hadn’t come home in time, [the paper] might have blown away, and I would never have found out about it. …I think what happened is they made the decision and then put it aside for years.”

Street parking will be restricted around the new traffic circles to create a clearing, and “a few spaces” will be eliminated, Kuhn says. Devansky worries that will take free parking from patrons of the International Church of Cannabis, which attracts tourists from around the world, and popular neighborhood spots Fire on the Mountain and Candlelight Tavern. “That will move parking further into the neighborhood,” he says.

Wagner also worries about parking and sympathizes for large trucks that must travel through the neighborhood. Now retired, she relies on an arborist to trim trees in front of her house and was told that they won’t be able to steer their large truck and cherry picker around the traffic circles. Wagner also points out that Royal Crest Dairy, the enduring milk delivery service, operates out of a building a few blocks away and comes down East Dakota to start its route.

The residential streets in her neighborhood are “very narrow,” and the traffic is “very slow,” she says. Traffic circles “work best in quieter, wide streets, where there are two lanes that are easier to maneuver,” Wagner argues. “Not, in effect, the squished-up lanes that we have.”

According to Kuhn, the traffic circles were also installed for “aesthetic” reasons, which was part of the reason why flex posts were removed downtown.

“We have been working over the past several years with community members to learn and iterate upon our designs to make them work and look better aesthetically,” she says. “Over this time, we have modified bikeway design standards to significantly reduce the number of white flexible posts, reduce the number of signs in traffic circles while sustaining those necessary for safety.”

Already unhappy with flex posts in the bike lanes, Thomas finds traffic circles ugly, too, and doesn’t want them taking up space “for no reason” on his narrow neighborhood streets.

“The bikeways we have already are unsightly, ineffective, and not a lot of people use them,” he notes. “They clutter up the neighborhood, they confuse drivers, and they perhaps don’t do as much good as people think they’re doing.”

While concerns may vary among residents, they all share a frustration with how DOTI is rolling out the project.

Wagner says that her emails to DOTI in September went unanswered for weeks until more people complained. Devansky says he’s heard the same from other residents.

“Suddenly, there was an uproar from other neighbors as well, and [DOTI] started communicating,” Wagner says. “It takes a lot more time and energy and money than people think to communicate adequately with citizens about what’s going on.”

Wash Park West residents are now asking the city, which is already in the middle of a fight over changes to nearby Alameda, to shut down the project.

Devansky wants the city to start over and incorporate community feedback the whole way through. “Come back to the drawing board and think about how you’re doing this,” he says. “We just want a seat at the table to be able to raise these very legitimate concerns.”

Thomas would like to see Denver abandon the idea completely and focus on improving the crossings at busy roads like Pearl and Logan streets. “To me, that’s where we need help,” he says, “getting from neighborhood to neighborhood and getting across busy streets. Traffic circles within the neighborhood don’t seem to be very effective to me.”

According to DOTI executive director Amy Ford, neighborhood opposition can make a difference. During an advisory board meeting on November 18, Ford said she was listening to residents and that projects have been canceled or changed based on community feedback before. 

“We take the feedback that we get from the public seriously,” she said. “In the instance of Kearney and Krameria, we made adjustments and included new design standards.” 

The changes to that bikeway included adding speed humps and easier street-crossing points, and removing flex posts.