Big orange barrels. Jersey barriers. Makeshift stoplights. Drivers snaking along two narrow lanes of traffic. And few, if any, on-street parking spaces to be found.
Construction has hurt businesses and upended travel on East Colfax Avenue in recent months as work crews began the years-long process of reshaping the street to prioritize Regional Transportation District buses.
The street can be chaotic. But it turns out there’s at least one silver lining: City data shows there have been fewer crashes on Colfax under construction than at any point since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
There were just eight crashes between Broadway and York Street in February, matching the total from June 2020 — the lowest number for any month in the city’s public dataset that goes back to 2013. The same area averaged nearly 20 crashes per month over the last 12 years.
The narrowing of the road during construction likely caused the drop, said University of Colorado Denver professor of civil engineering Wes Marshall.
Cars trundled by as Marshall gave Denverite his expert analysis in front of the Cathedral Basilica.
“They’re going pretty slow,” said Marshall, who last year published a book examining traffic engineers’ role in road deaths and injuries. “That's what happens when you have fewer lanes to give them. You can only go sort of as fast as the car in front of you. And if somebody is obeying the speed limit, then all of a sudden everybody's obeying the speed limit.”
The BRT project, which is set to wrap up in 2027, amounts to the most comprehensive overhaul of East Colfax since streetcars left it in the middle of the last century.
Marshall said while the project will improve transit, he believes it will also make the corridor a safer, calmer, and “more humane space.”
Three people we met on Colfax agree that traffic is moving slower — and said that’s OK
Michael Mitchell, owner of Alpha Movers, was so excited to talk to a Denverite reporter that he briefly drove the wrong way up Washington Street to find a place to pull over and chat. Driving the avenue takes longer than it used to, he said.
“If you don't got the time, don't drive on Colfax,” he said.
“Yeah, definitely,” added Xavier Baez, Mitchell’s operations manager.
But both men agreed that it’s also a less stressful drive than before. They don’t avoid Colfax because so many destinations are right on it — and they said other drivers, unless they are pressed for time, shouldn’t either.
“It’s the longest street,” Mitchell said. “You could just observe Colorado from its finest to its worst, and back again.”
Linda Bocek, who was waiting for the bus with her husband John, said she enjoyed the slower traffic.
“People are paying more attention,” she said. “If they're driving more slowly and if you're hit by a slower driving car, you have a chance to survive.”
Some worried the project would redirect cars elsewhere. Data shows there’s been a small bump in crashes nearby
Two one-way couplets — 13th and 14th avenues, and 17th and 18th avenues — near Colfax allow drivers to speed in and out of central Denver.
Residents, business owners and others have long had concerns about the streets, says a recent city-commissioned study that also predicted BRT construction would push more cars to them.
The study found that a majority of drivers on those roads — as many as 76 percent on 17th Avenue — traveled over the speed limit, with some exceeding 60 mph.
“They're designed almost like racetracks and that's what you get,” said Marshall, the CU Denver professor.
City data shows those streets have historically seen a fraction of the crashes that Colfax has. Seventeenth, for example, averaged nine crashes per month between 2013 and early 2025.
That ticked up to 13 crashes in February — not unheard of, but the most since October 2022.
The city is already working on plans to add safety improvements on 17th and 18th, including lane reductions in some areas.
The recent study recommended a number of other possible safety-focused changes, including red-light cameras, bulbouts to narrow intersections and even speed “tables” to force slower speeds. City transportation officials are currently considering those ideas, Department of Transportation and Infrastructure Executive Director Amy Ford told Denverite in a recent interview.
“I might have more on that coming up here soon,” she said.
Denverite’s Kevin J. Beaty contributed data analysis to this story.
