The pilot projects in place in 4th and 5th Streets, and the planned one for 7th Street continue to cause concern and hassles for businesses and citizens.

When it comes to the pilot projects on 4th and 5th Streets, and the plan in the works for another on 7th Street, the citizens of Grand Junction and Mesa County appear to be hitting the brakes at a red light while some members of the city council see nothing but green lights ahead. 

City Councilman, and former Grand Junction police officer, Cody Kennedy spent an entire day interviewing Main Street businesses and told the Business Times perhaps only five or six out of the 60-plus businesses he asked were supportive of the changes being made by the City Council. Mayor Pro Tem, Abe Herman, countered Kennedy’s claim, responding, “There’s certainly a mixed reaction, but I’ve heard a lot of positives as well. And you know, I think sometimes folks can get caught in an echo chamber.”

“The thing I’d start with is, ‘What’s the purpose of this configuration?’ Is the purpose how it affects business, which I think it is to some extent, and I’ve discussed that publicly before. But the bigger thing is safety,” said Herman. “We have robust data around downtown and that can tell us whether it’s positively or negatively affecting the downtown,” Herman continued, “For a number of years, when you went to downtown Grand Junction, you could park in front of the business that you wanted to go to. You could just get out of your car and go there, and that’s no longer a reality, and that’s not something the city has caused.” 

Kennedy explained it would be a much safer plan to put bike lanes on 3rd and 6th Streets because those streets have much less traffic already. “Can we just use the design from the 2022 study and raise all the crosswalks making them substantial speedbumps?” Kennedy asked. “This, incorporated with a change in timing of the traffic signals would make it much more likely that vehicles coming into the downtown area from Orchard Mesa or North Avenue will need to stop or substantially lower their speeds. Better yet, let’s provide some outstanding bike lanes on 3rd and 6th Streets while keeping 4th and 5th Streets intact for motor vehicles to effectively utilize the Safe System Approach in separating road users in space to enhance safety for all.” 

Kennedy stated he had not seen numbers from the city related to bike usage on 4th and 5th Streets prior to the pilot program being put into place although he stated a local bike group was going to start using those thoroughfares to make the numbers in the pilot program data to show increased usage.

“What we’re going to be looking at going forward is the data around those things like transportation engineering, which is what this is. It’s a data driven process not an anecdotal process. And so throughout this pilot project, what they’ve been looking at is traffic speeds and whether it’s positively or negatively affecting that number of accidents,” said Herman, “Certainly you know, both for automobile accidents, pedestrians or bicyclists who are injured, all of those kinds of things.” Herman continued, “So I think the changes are largely positive, but if the data comes out and it tells us that something’s wrong, the data is the data, there’s no arguing with that. So if we see an increase in accidents, or if we see more unsafe conditions, then that would certainly change how we look at the project, because there’s no ideology here. There’s no, you know, being stuck in a certain mindset. If the data tells us something different about this project, that’s where we go with it.” Herman indicated initial data would hopefully become available by the year’s end or early to Spring of 2025.

A request to the Grand Junction Police Department about traffic incident reports on 4th Street between Ute and North for July 3rd through October 8th of 2024 (the first three months of the pilot project) showed 6 incidents, matching the number of incidents for the same time frame in 2023. However, one of the 2024 incidents involved was a car/bicycle incident at 4th and Ute. Additionally, the police reports showed no traffic incidents on 4th Street involving pedestrians or bicycles for all of 2023.

Replying to a screenshot from a planning commission meeting concerning what actions the city is taking which prolong the predominance of cars Herman noted, “Well, when you take it out of context, you can mean whatever you want it to mean. And what happened with that? It was sent out by a planning commission member who was in a workshop. The planning commissioner has his own certain ideology, and he chose to take it out of context and turn it into something it wasn’t, said Herman, “So when you’re engaging in discussions that planning commission members or council members do that are philosophical conversations about larger infrastructure, the cost of extending infrastructure, but are the type of growth that you want to develop, you’re going to ask a lot of questions. That doesn’t mean that that’s the ideology of the organization. It means that you’re having a philosophical consideration about what is the right direction. And those are the people in the room who are crafting that.”

Kennedy responded it appeared to him there may be some activists in the planning process who want to push people out of driving cars. Kennedy noted that in the 123 pages of the city’s Ped and Bike plan the current pilot project’s design was nowhere to be found. “You may or may not be surprised to learn that there were many examples of how streets should be designed, but none of them represented what we see implemented on 4th and 5th Street. The parallel parking on the right-hand side is simply not found in the plan. So why are we not following the plan? Where’s the simple barricade to protect the bike lane?” Kennedy said.

“We’re trying to provide people the liberty to move around the city and the way that works best for them, and it may, but it also can include other forms of transportation,” said Herman. And when asked how will the city move forward once data is available? “So that’s ultimately going to be up to council as to how it’s budgeted. We don’t have the 2025 budget finalized, but it has come up as a topic of conversation. We have at least one council member who wanted to move forward quickly, and then in the budget, while a number of us have pushed back and said we need to get the data. We don’t need to rush the process” said Herman, “So I’d say, you know, at the very earliest, Council could put it in a 2026 budget. We’ll get the data, there will be a policy discussion, there will probably be more public outreach at that point, and then there are decisions to be made about, is this working? Is it safer? Is it having the desired effect? And do we want to start moving forward with parts of it? Are there other changes that need to happen? There’s just a lot to be talked about there, because it is a big change.“

Kennedy also noted one council member’s desire to move quickly to implement the changes even though he personally has not seen any data on which to make decisions on any part of the project. Kennedy suggested, “It’s possible that council member would like to get it finalized now in case there is a change in council in this next election. New council members would have a much harder time reversing it.”