Around 300 people packed into the Clayton Early Learning Center on the evening of May 13, filling out survey forms and covering a map of Colorado Boulevard with sticky notes. Wayne Graham, a Hilltop resident who rides transit as far as Loveland, wore a hand-lettered "No BRT" sign taped to his shirt. A few feet away, neighbor Hoke Stapp told a reporter he didn't think a dedicated bus lane would cut driving traffic or meaningfully grow ridership. The Colorado Department of Transportation had come back with three design options for the corridor, and the room was not shy about which ones it liked.
That was four months ago. CDOT had told the Hilltop Neighborhood Association it hoped to name a Locally Preferred Alternative, the formal term for the winning design, by the end of summer. Summer has come and gone. As of the most recent project update, published in late August, CDOT still describes itself as working toward selecting a preferred configuration, not announcing one. The deadline the neighborhood was given has quietly slipped, and in the vacuum, the opposition has grown from a Hilltop concern into a multi-neighborhood one.
What the Three Options Actually Are
It helps to know what's on the table before deciding how to feel about the delay. CDOT's alternatives boil down to three configurations for the seven-mile stretch between East 40th Avenue and Hampden Avenue.
| Alternative | Dedicated bus lane? | Estimated cost | Traffic impact | CDOT's own read |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mixed flow | No, buses share existing lanes | roughly $200 to $250 million | About 5% longer drive times, close to no-build | "Good" agency support |
| Side-running | Yes, along the curb, with right turns allowed in the bus lane | around $250 million | Cited by Hilltop's own board as a cut-through risk for Monaco Parkway and Holly Street | Still under evaluation |
| Center-running (or a center/side hybrid) | Yes, down the middle for part of the route | around $350 million | One configuration would roughly double southbound drive time across the full corridor, from about 25 minutes to 50 | CDOT's own materials call this option's traffic and cost impacts "unacceptable" |
The transit case for doing any of this isn't invented. Colorado Boulevard sits on Denver's High Injury Network, and CDOT has reported 117 crashes resulting in death or serious injury along the corridor between 2018 and 2022. Roughly 2,800 to 3,000 people already ride the bus here daily, a number CDOT projects could roughly double under BRT, and planning documents put population growth along the corridor at 52% by 2050. Nobody involved, including the neighbors most opposed to the current designs, is arguing the road works well as it is.
The Nuance Hilltop's Own Board Is Making
It would be easy to read the sticky notes and the "No BRT" signs from May and conclude Hilltop is simply against buses. The Hilltop Neighborhood Association's own position paper, released after its board met on June 23, says something more specific. The board's stated opposition centers on the side-running and center-running alternatives, the two options most likely to push regional commuters off a slowed Colorado Boulevard and onto residential streets like Monaco Parkway and Holly Street once general travel lanes disappear. That's a narrower objection than "no project," and it lines up with CDOT's own numbers: the mixed-flow option, the one with the least dramatic traffic impact, is also the one CDOT's materials rate as having the strongest agency support so far.
HNA vice president Michael Atkins put the neighborhood's position plainly to 9News ahead of the May open house: nobody disputes that Colorado Boulevard needs work, the disagreement is over which fix. That's a different conversation than the binary bus-lanes-or-nothing framing the open house signage suggested, and it's worth knowing if you're trying to guess where this actually lands.
The Fight Outgrew Hilltop Over the Summer
Two developments since May changed the shape of this story. First, Glendale's city council, representing the roughly one mile of the corridor that runs through their small city and includes major sales-tax generators like Target, Dick's Sporting Goods, and Home Depot, voted unanimously in favor of a "no build" resolution. Glendale's argument leans on its own traffic counts, which the city says show vehicle volumes on Colorado Boulevard declining at every measured intersection over the past two decades, cutting against CDOT's growth projections.
Second, and more recently, a grassroots effort calling itself Save Colorado Boulevard emerged in August, led by resident Woody Garnsey. Rather than opposing BRT outright, the group is asking CDOT to pause any further planning on Colorado Boulevard for two years after the East Colfax BRT project is fully operational, so the region has real ridership and traffic data from a comparable corridor before committing hundreds of millions of dollars to a second one. Garnsey has taken that ask to neighborhood organizations beyond Hilltop, including Lowry United Neighborhoods, whose board discussed the proposal at its August meeting. Whether that coalition solidifies into something CDOT has to formally respond to is still an open question, but it's a different conversation than the one Hilltop was having alone in May.
What This Means If You're Driving This Corridor Today
None of this changes anything about Colorado Boulevard right now. There's no construction, no lane closures, no start date. What has changed is the confidence anyone can have in the timeline. CDOT's own project materials still describe a 2030 construction start as the goal if the process holds, but the process has already missed one internal deadline, and the opposition it's trying to work around now includes a Denver city council member expressing public skepticism, a neighboring city's unanimous no-build vote, and an organized push for a multi-year pause.
If you live near this corridor, the practical thing to watch isn't the open house season, that's over for now, it's whether CDOT names a preferred alternative before the end of the year and whether that choice is the mixed-flow option its own analysis currently favors, or one of the two configurations Hilltop's board has specifically flagged as a risk to Monaco Parkway and Holly Street. The Hilltop Neighborhood Association's newsletter and CDOT's own project page are both tracking this in real time, and either is a better source than a secondhand summary of last spring's open house.
Hilltop's daily rhythm, the walk from Holly Street's shops up to Cranmer Park, the drive down 6th Avenue into downtown, doesn't hinge on which lane configuration eventually wins. But the answer to that question will shape how much of that daily rhythm still happens on quiet streets versus streets absorbing traffic that used to stay on the boulevard. It's a decision worth watching closely, and worth watching from primary sources rather than from whoever posted about it first.
If you have questions about how a project like this could touch a specific block or a specific home down the road, that's exactly the kind of hyperlocal detail Julie Winger tracks for clients in Hilltop and the neighborhoods around it. Schedule a neighborhood consultation any time you want a straight answer grounded in what's actually happening here, not what a headline from four months ago implied.
