Contributed by:
Brendan Leonard/YourHub.com
Article Contributed on: 11/8/2007 12:50:43 PM
If Denver Street Maintenance keeps on schedule, the wrists and butts of many Capitol Hill cyclists can emit a collective "ahhh" on Nov. 10.
Cutting through Cheesman Park near my apartment on Tuesday afternoon, I noticed something odd: The ride in my friend's car was not bumpy and noisy. They were resurfacing 12th Avenue all the way through the park, triple exclamation point. The road through Cheesman has been a cause for whining for many of my cyclist friends and I since last year's Christmas blizzards.
There were many strategies to taking a road bicycle on 12th Avenue through the park, and most of us tried all of them: Riding slow, weaving around the potholes and ruts, which angered following drivers; riding in the concrete gutter of the street, which never worked going eastbound because the gutter was always full of parked cars, and you had to pass by that one guy who hung out by the bus stop, accosting folks to give him money for unspecified services; and finally, what I resorted to lately, cutting through on the 12-inch wide footpath that went through the grass. A former employee of our bike shop broke her arm after hitting a pothole in the park and flying off her bike last spring.
I started to avoid the park completely over the past few months, taking a different route to Liks, friends' apartments, Liks, the Tattered Cover on Colfax and Liks, even though 12th Avenue passes about a half-block from my apartment. My friend
Nick Nunns, however, didn't. He rode through that park every day, Monday through Friday, from his old apartment at 1149 Columbine St. to the 10th and Osage Light Rail station, so he could hop on the train to the DTC for work. And boy, did we hear about it.
A few weeks ago, however, Nick moved to a new apartment at 1119 Lafayette St., completely cutting out the part of his commute through the park, and bringing a sort of serenity to his life.
So, when I discovered 12th Avenue was being resurfaced, I gave him a call, with pad and pen in hand, to see what he thought of the whole thing.
"It's about [expletive] time," he said. I should mention that Nick doesn't usually use THAT much profanity.
"No, that's good news. That park was ridiculous," he said. "It was just [expletive] terrible, that's all there is to it. It was the worst place to ride a street bike."
Nick, of course, has been proposing for weeks at our Thursday Night Dinner Ride* that the City of Denver do at least one of two things to make Capitol Hill a better place to ride a bike:
1) Make 12th Avenue into a pedestrian mall, allowing only bikes and foot traffic, from Downing Street to Broadway.
2) Close down Cheesman Park to cars and repave it.
Well, the city has been working on a
Master Plan for Cheesman Park since spring 2006, and it might make Nick a little happier. Instead of having nine entrances for cars (right now, cars can enter the park on 12th Avenue on both sides, Franklin Street on both sides, Gilpin Street, Ninth Avenue on both sides, 11th Avenue on the east side, and Williams Street), there will be only four, according to
the new plan. There will be five new bike and pedestrian-access points and more bike paths through the park, among a ton of other new plans, including four miles of new trails, raised pedestrian crossings, narrowing the road, new plants. There are, of course, many more steps before any of this becomes a reality.
Right now, I'm pretty excited about the new asphalt, which made my bike ride feel more like a limo ride this morning. Heck, I'll probably ride through the park at night and not even worry about getting tossed over my handlebars. Nick Nunns, however, was less than ecstatic about the new road surfacing.
"[Expletive], why the hell would they do that, a month after I move?" Nick asked. "I should take a spin through there, just to see what it's like."
*The Thursday Night Dinner Ride is the longest-running Thursday night dinner ride of its kind in the Rocky Mountain region.
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