Ask anyone who has waited through three light cycles to turn left onto Colorado Boulevard during evening rush, and you'll hear the same complaint. Ask what should replace the current setup, and the answers stop lining up.
That gap explains one of the odder turns in Hilltop's civic life this year. In April, the neighborhood association that speaks for the streets fronting the boulevard sat down with state transportation officials and agreed, without much argument, that the corridor is broken. By June, that same association had filed a formal position paper against the state's own plan to fix it. Nothing about the underlying problem changed in those ten weeks. What changed is that residents got to see the numbers.
A Room Full of People Who Agree on the Problem
In late April 2026, the Hilltop Neighborhood Association hosted the Colorado Department of Transportation's project team for a community meeting at Graland Country Day School, inside the neighborhood boundaries. HNA vice president Michael Atkins had already summed up the mood to 9NEWS that April: "We all in the neighborhood agree that Colorado Boulevard is old, a mess, needs to be fixed, needs to be changed." The question, he said, was never whether. It was what.
That distinction matters because Colorado Boulevard is not a side street with a pothole problem. It's a state highway that CDOT itself has classified as part of Denver's high-injury network, carrying roughly one million bus riders a year along the stretch between I-70 and the Southmoor transit station. CDOT has described its proposed Bus Rapid Transit service as functioning like light rail on wheels: dedicated infrastructure, faster boarding, and stations built for people who don't drive.
What CDOT Actually Put on the Table
The April meeting wasn't just a venting session. CDOT walked residents through the specific alternatives under study, plus a fourth option: doing nothing. According to the HNA's own meeting recap, the two build alternatives with the clearest numbers looked like this:
| CDOT Alternative | Bus Travel Time | Personal Vehicle Travel Time |
|---|---|---|
| Mixed Flow (buses share existing lanes) | Up to 25% faster than doing nothing | About 5% slower |
| Side Running (dedicated bus lane, right turns permitted) | Up to 30% faster than doing nothing | Up to 1.4 times longer |
Look at that table for more than a few seconds and the trade-off comes into focus. Going from Mixed Flow to Side Running buys buses five more percentage points of speed. It costs drivers the difference between a mildly annoying commute and one that takes nearly half again as long. CDOT priced the Mixed Flow option at roughly $200 to $250 million and said it carries good agency support. A third option, running buses in a dedicated center lane similar to the design already under construction on Colfax Avenue, is the one the nonprofit Denver Streets Partnership has been actively campaigning for, though CDOT hasn't released comparable cost or delay figures for it yet.
CDOT's case for acting now rests on a growth number that got less attention than the traffic figures: the agency told residents that population along the corridor is projected to increase by 52% by 2050. That's the number driving the urgency. It's also the number that, so far, hasn't moved the neighborhood's calculus on which alternative to support.
The Two Months Between "Fix It" and "Not Like This"
Lay out the dates and the shift is hard to miss.
- Late April 2026: The HNA hosts CDOT's project team at Graland Country Day School. General agreement that the corridor needs work.
- April 30, 2026: The HNA publishes its meeting recap, including the Mixed Flow and Side Running numbers above and the 52% growth projection.
- May 13, 2026: CDOT holds its second public open house, at the Clayton Early Learning Center, drawing about 300 residents according to Westword's coverage of the event. Attendees left sticky notes on a corridor map, and opinions split hard.
- June 23, 2026: The HNA board approves a formal position paper opposing the current proposals in their present form.
Ten weeks. That's the entire distance between "needs to be changed" and a neighborhood association putting its opposition in writing.
What Changed the Board's Mind
The HNA's own paper doesn't hedge. It argues that CDOT's data indicates the lane-elimination alternatives "could double travel times along this 7-mile stretch," and warns that the resulting gridlock would push commuters onto residential streets like Monaco Parkway and Holly Street looking for a way around it. The board also raised a business concern that doesn't show up in a traffic model: removing turn pockets and adding restrictive medians makes it harder for customers and delivery vehicles to reach corridor storefronts at all, regardless of how fast the buses eventually run. The paper labels the current plan's transit-only focus a case of "bus-only blinders," pointing out that Colorado Boulevard traffic isn't one commute pattern but a tangle of multi-stop errands that a fixed-route bus system wasn't built to serve.
None of that is CDOT getting the math wrong. It's a neighborhood group looking at CDOT's own projections and deciding the version on the table doesn't work for the street where their houses sit.
Not Every Neighbor Agrees With the Board, Either
The open house made clear that Hilltop itself isn't unified behind the HNA's position. Hilltop resident Hoke Stapp told Denverite he doubts a bus-only lane would actually reduce car traffic or meaningfully boost transit ridership. Fellow Hilltop resident Wayne Graham showed up wearing a hand-lettered "No BRT" sign and put a number on his skepticism: "I would not spend $300 million to do it." Both men live inside the same neighborhood boundaries the HNA board represents.
At the other end of that same room, local transit advocate Molly Jones spoke in favor of building out the bus network for safety reasons, and the Denver Streets Partnership was working the crowd to build support for the full center-running design. The disagreement isn't confined to a boardroom. It runs through the sidewalks and front yards the corridor actually touches.
The Cautionary Tale Next Door
Much of the wariness traces back to what's already happening a few miles away. Construction on the Colfax Avenue BRT project began downtown in 2025 and expanded into Aurora this past spring, according to the Denver Gazette. Westword has reported that the ongoing work, combined with limited foot traffic and reduced parking, has been followed by a string of longtime Denver businesses closing along the corridor, even with the city offering a $15,000 grant to help struggling storefronts get through construction. For Hilltop residents watching Colorado Boulevard head toward a similar process, Colfax isn't an abstraction. It's the neighbor's yard sale nobody wanted to happen to them.
What Actually Happens Next, and When
Here's the part that should lower everyone's blood pressure a little: nothing is being built yet. CDOT's own project page places Colorado Boulevard in the alternatives analysis phase as of 2026, with preliminary design not starting until 2027. Denverite and 9NEWS both report the earliest realistic construction start is 2030, which would put Colorado Boulevard behind both the Colfax project, on track for completion by mid-2027, and the Federal Boulevard BRT, expected to break ground in 2027. CDOT told the HNA it hopes to settle on a Locally Preferred Alternative by the end of summer 2026, a deadline that, as of this writing, is only weeks away. CDOT was still collecting input through an online survey as of this spring, giving residents a direct way to weigh in before that decision locks in.
The bigger point isn't the construction date. It's that the group closest to this street looked at the state's own performance numbers and concluded the current menu of options asks Hilltop to trade a lot of daily driving time for a modest gain in bus speed, and decided that math doesn't clear the bar yet. Whatever gets built here in the next decade will be shaped by residents who did that arithmetic before construction crews ever showed up.
If you're weighing what a corridor decision like this means for a property along Colorado Boulevard, or you just want a read on Hilltop that goes past the median price, our team at Linkow Baltimore Team tracks this kind of local detail as closely as we track the comps. Start with a Free Home Valuation and we'll walk you through what we're seeing on the ground.
