Arapahoe’s new look
The City of Boulder will host an open house on Feb. 15 to solicit public input about how to restructure East Arapahoe.
As one of the busiest corridors in the city, it’s critical the City do the right things to maximize travel along the route.
Whiffs of early ideas have all centered on the “Full-on Boulder” approach to the road revision: Arapahoe will be expanded to eight lanes; four will be reserved for non-electric bikes; two will be reserved for a single bus that makes 48 stops between Davidson Mesa and 28th Street; and the other two will mostly be e-bikes, Google employees and conventional car owners but only if they go to Council with a box of cookies and say “Pretty, pretty please.”
Other plans include building more tech campuses on East Arapahoe, removing all possible parking (to encourage people to use those four ample bike lanes), never plowing it, suddenly reducing it to one lane as soon as it gets “farmy,” and finding a sister highway for it in Los Angeles.
Hey, how about one of those two-way turn lanes in the middle of the road that everyone loves so much? How about eight-foot shoulders just in case you want to have a picnic on the side of the road?
No matter what the reimagination looks like, one thing we know for sure: Boulder’s definitely not going to mess this up.
Here we go again
Lord help us when Governor John Hickenlooper and his COGCC lapdog Matt Lapore decide to help us out and make us safe from oil and gas extraction. This time they want to help us not explode and die from flow lines under our houses. They are such good guys.
Every time these two oil and gas industry cheerleaders are forced to pretend to take action because of an industry screw up we get the same rhetoric. Something along the lines of “Colorado has once again stepped up and placed the nation’s — no, make that the universe’s — strictest regulations in the history of the world on the oil and gas industry.”
This time their hollow boasting is in regards to flow lines, those things that caused the explosion in Firestone last year that killed two men and severely injured a woman who were simply living their lives in their own home. Well, at the time of the explosion, the COGCC — the state agency that is tapped to both promote and regulate the oil and gas industry — dodged criticism by saying it wasn’t in charge of regulating flows lines, the communities were in charge of that. Well, now the COGCC has decided to regulate flow lines.
A skeptic might point out that the state might just be doing so because towns along the Front Range accepted the COGCC’s excuse for not preventing people from dying and were starting to talk about putting big setbacks on flow lines to protect their citizens by making it harder to drill in our neighborhoods. But surely the real reason the state suddenly claimed authority over flow line regalation is because Matt and John care about us.
A simpler remedy would be to just pass a 2,500 foot setback initiative concerning oil and gas extraction and then flow lines, at least the new ones, won’t kill us anymore. Bet Matt and John never thought of that.
