After years of planning, Grand Junction introduces protected bike lanes on two busy roads
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GRAND JUNCTION, Colo. — White plastic posts line the sides of 4th and 5th Streets downtown as a part of a new design to protect dedicated bike lanes and make the roads safer for drivers, cyclists and pedestrians.
“I go out of my way to take those streets because they feel so safe,” said Ian Thomas, resting on the handlebars of his bike, surrounded by other cyclists, waiting for a weekly group ride around downtown to start.
This is the first time a design like this has been used in the Grand Valley after a report on types and locations of crashes from 2016 to 2022 in downtown Grand Junction identified 4th and 5th Streets as having high crash intersections.
The data showed transportation planners that something had to be done to deter the speeding drivers on 4th and 5th streets, which are both one-way roads between North Avenue and Ute Avenue. Currently, the bike lanes in the corridors are buffered by parallel parking and three-foot-tall plastic posts along most of the roadway.
“Having two wide lanes in a one way configuration generally means drivers felt more comfortable driving at a higher rate of speed through those corridors,” said Trent Prall, the engineering and transportation director for the City of Grand Junction.
The route for GJ Bike Night, the weekly group ride Thomas started three years ago, often loops through Main Street and the 4th and 5th Street area. He got the idea for bike night after a trip to Reno, where he happened to be during a large, monthly community ride.
When he’s not planning themes for bike night or advocating for bike and pedestrian infrastructure with Grand Valley Streets Alliance, Thomas is a full-time bike mechanic at Gear Junction, an outdoor equipment store downtown.
The dinging, blinking caravan of riders buzzed as they turned onto the street with the new design during the latest ride as dozens of them squeezed into the protected lane.
The bikeway was created over the last two months as part of Grand Junction’s pilot project turning the two, one-way streets into one lane with parking and the bike lane using more of the width of the roadway.
“When you're in that protected bike lane, it feels more quiet. It feels more calm. You don't have two cars going 45 miles an hour directly next to you,” said Thomas of the change from two driving lanes to one.
A parking spot was taken out on the south end of 4th Street early on in the pilot because if a big vehicle was parked there it would block the necessary sight distance on the road, according to Prall.
“We're making changes, we were [recently] making a change on the placement of a couple of those plastic delineators, or the bike lane barriers, and so that's in flux as we get concerns,” said Prall.
The city will collect traffic data from the pilot over the next two years, encourage residents to leave feedback on the website for the project and make changes as needed.
“We're hoping to move out of the pilot phase into a more permanent infrastructure here over the next couple of years,” said Prall.
People who ride bikes downtown see the changes as an acknowledgement that cars aren’t the only way of getting around.
“It's a paradigm shift, because this new design recognizes that, A, walking and cycling are valid means of transportation and B, they don't have the same amount of protection as a vehicle,” said Thomas.
The bike lanes and safer crosswalks are a response to community surveys the city conducted over the last few years on where residents felt safe, or unsafe, on roads, sidewalks and bike lanes in town.
“Cars move very fast up 5th and rarely stop for pedestrians at the crosswalk,” said one comment during the 2021 outreach on the project.
Safer, more numerous crosswalks, more bike lanes, and reducing crashes were some of the priorities identified from the in-person and online comments that year.
The Grand Junction Pedestrian and Bicycle Plan identifies dozens of streets in different parts of town as priorities for adding “high comfort” infrastructure for people that aren’t getting around by car.
“It's been really encouraging to see how responsive they are. I was here when the process started three years ago and they were really ramping up their community engagement,” said Thomas.
One cyclist at a recent GJ Bike Night ride said she goes a little out of her way to get to her job on Main Street, because it feels safer.
“I probably 50/50 drive or bike to work,” said Emily Smalley.
“I live up on Orchard [Avenue] and usually the safest way that I feel riding is down through campus and down 10th to Main Street, because there's a bike lane and because it's so quiet. Now that 4th and 5th have bike lanes I’m going to try that.”
Cyclists are often driving downtown as well, and acknowledge it’s a change for everyone.
“As long as I'm paying attention, as long as drivers pay attention, then we should be good.
We just got to watch out for each other,” said Jackson Moore, another cyclist.
He helps plan routes and manage social media for GJ Bike Night and hopes cars and bikes can coexist, each getting to travel efficiently and safely.
Each week there’s a theme for the ride, like “twinning,” disco or llamas.
“I'm also that guy that brings the speaker. I just rigged the speaker to my backpack,” said Moore.
He provides a custom soundtrack for the ride, playing a collaborative playlist as gears click and riders shout “happy Friday!” to drivers patiently waiting for the mobile party to pass through an intersection.
“I was drawn to bike night because it promotes community and it promotes activity, which I 100% love. There's a common goal. We all ride together, we all stay safe, and we just have a good time,” said Moore.
Safety is a concern for the Downtown Development Authority, a partner with the City of Grand Junction on the project. As hundreds of new apartments are nearing completion, and construction on other developments is just getting started, Brandon Stam wants to get ahead of potential problems.
“We were certainly involved in that initial planning stage and multiple stakeholder groups that they reached out to provide feedback on the project,” said Stam, the executive director of the Downtown Grand Junction Partnership.
“I would say that the board was most concerned with slowing speeds,” he said. “There is going to be an obvious conflict with having a high speed thoroughfare and adding more downtown residents into the mix.”
In 2021 the plan was to change 4th and 5th back to standard two-lane roads, with one lane in each direction. From 2022 to 2023, the city and DDA received feedback from businesses on the project highlighting community concerns that drivers would lose parking spots in the area. The one lane, one way configuration was suggested to preserve seven parking spots.
“We went back to our consultants and [asked,] with our traffic that we need to convey through our community safely today, as well as in 20 - 25 years, would a one way, one lane configuration work here in our downtown context,” said Prall.
The budget for the whole project is $1.2 million, according to the city. The majority of the money is going to road maintenance that was necessary anyway, even if the lanes weren’t changed.
The changes feel like they’re coming out of nowhere for some people in town.
“Did Grand Junction residents have any input on this? Because the majority of our citizens would surely have rejected it,” said Jim Denton, a resident, in a letter to The Daily Sentinel.
The city took comments in-person and online in 2021 about the 4th and 5th Street project specifically, and had an online survey and open house event in the fall of 2022 to gather information for the pedestrian and bicycle plan.
Every time a municipality or county makes a change, they say they gave lots of notice and got lots of comments. But then when they do it, many people say they never heard of it,” said Gene Goffin, a resident who has written about his concerns over the bike lane.
Goffin describes himself as a news junkie, but says he wasn’t aware of this project until it was happening.
“If the public says they didn’t know about it, doesn’t that say the government didn’t do a good enough job?”
Stam says the length of time has been a challenge, as there are different businesses in some locations, and different people on city council since the project started.
“In an ideal world of a project, you're usually doing your planning, outreach in six to 12 months and then you're transitioning right to the project so it’s fresh on everybody's mind,” he said.
For this project, however, the time between outreach really getting underway, which was in 2021, and the physical changes to the streets was three years. The roads have been under discussion since 1981, when the Downtown Development Authority identified 4th and 5th Streets as needing work in a major planning document from that year.
The Downtown Development Authority uses cell phone data to measure visitor traffic on and around Main Street. Visitors often increase with nice weather, but the data is useful in combination with other measurements when determining the outcome of a project.
“It gives you a fuller picture, along with the city traffic data, as well as anecdotal feedback from different businesses. I think it's hard to directly correlate any of that to a specific project, but I think you can at least start to get an idea of how things are being impacted,” said Stam.
The pilot ends in 2026, with speeds and accident rates being reviewed, and the city looking for any changes in pedestrian and vehicle volume downtown.
“Downtown is evolving from just being a shopping mall to being a place of commerce, a place of residential activity, essentially a lifestyle center,” said Stam.