The Boulder City Council on Thursday evening asked questions and gave feedback about a major transportation project aimed at improving safety on Iris Avenue.
From 2016 to 2023, the Iris Avenue corridor saw 345 crashes, or about 43 per year. Iris is a major arterial street that is part of the city’s “high risk network” of roads that have a disproportionate number of traffic crashes.
Iris Avenue is also one of the priority corridors in Boulder’s Core Arterial Network initiative, which aims to create a safe and interconnected system of streets with protected bike lanes, intersection enhancements and other improvements. Additionally, Boulder is pursuing its Vision Zero goal of eliminating fatal and serious injury crashes in the city.
City staffers have proposed four alternative designs for improvements on Iris Avenue. The first, alternative A, would add one-way protected bike lanes on each side of the road without changing the roadway width. Protected lanes can include things like physical separation and barriers. Currently, Iris has two lanes for cars going each direction, but this option would leave one driving lane in each direction plus a center lane that can be used by vehicles going either way — a configuration known as a “road diet.”
The road diet configuration would reduce the number of traffic lanes on the roadway, which can help calm traffic, reduce the lanes pedestrians must cross and make certain types of crashes less likely.
The second option, alternative B, would also use a road diet configuration, but would add a two-way protected bike lane on the north side of the road. The two-way bike lane could be used for emergency purposes if needed.
The third and fourth options, alternatives C and D, would require widening the roadway. Both would keep two lanes of traffic going in both directions while adding protected bike lanes. The main difference is that alternative C would have one-way bike lanes on either side of the road, while alternative D would have a two-way bike lane on the north side of the road. These two options would likely be much more expensive and take a much longer time to construct than the first two.
In any of the four alternatives, the lane configuration at the “bookends” of the corridor — the sections of Iris closest to Broadway on the west end and to 28th Street on the east end — would not change.
Transportation staffers at Thursday’s meeting said the community outreach on the project had been extensive, and that 2,600 people had engaged in the process. The project has been highly contentious. Supporters have said Iris Avenue badly needs to be made safer, while detractors worry about whether slowing traffic on the road would impede emergency services or evacuations or drive cut-through traffic into nearby neighborhoods.
Staffers emphasized that the city is also considering mitigation efforts on side streets near Iris. The alternatives were also developed in consultation with the departments that manage emergencies, such as Boulder Fire-Rescue and the Office of Disaster Management.
City Council members on Thursday were generally enthused about the project.
“I think what’s exciting about this project is we see the opportunity to create a more humane existence along Iris that will draw people to want to go there and create a better balance for everybody,” said Councilmember Ryan Schuchard.
Said Councilmember Tara Winer, “I hope the community does understand that (this project is) really about safety. It’s just so incredibly unsafe (on Iris).”
Some council members expressed concern that the process of developing this project has taken a long time, and they asked if it could be made more streamlined in the future. The city conducted in-depth engagement on the project in part because it anticipated that the project would have a strong impact on the community.
Councilmember Mark Wallach questioned whether the cost of the project — which could come to about $5 million — is justifiable given the city’s budget constraints. He also asked if pieces of the project could be tested incrementally before the city implements the whole plan.
City staffers said in response that once a design option for the project is chosen, the work could move ahead in phases, tackling some of the bigger safety concerns in the near term while proceeding at a manageable pace.
