Remove the Buses from North Nevada Avenue

On May 1, the City of Colorado Springs moved bus routes from both Cascade and Wasatch Avenues onto Nevada Avenue and radically increased the frequency of service. A City bus now travels up or down North Nevada Avenue through a residential neighborhood every seven and a half minutes. A total of 113 buses now pass through that neighborhood on that street every day. This is more than Academy Boulevard! In fact, North Nevada through the Old North End Neighborhood now has the highest number of buses running through it of any street in the entire City.

Here is a list of concerns:
1. Traffic volume on Nevada. Nevada already has the greatest volume of daily traffic of the four North-South streets in the Old End Neighborhood, and yet, buses were moved from two streets with significantly less traffic onto Nevada.
2. Nevada does not meet City or national road standards.
3. Unsafe clearance. Buses cannot safely maneuver in the narrow single lanes on Nevada and so routinely straddle both traffic lanes.
4. North Nevada Avenue already has serious traffic safety problems. In the last four years, there were a total of 4 traffic fatalities on North Nevada through the Old North End neighborhood. That is an average of 1 traffic fatality every year on a segment of roadway that is less than one and a half miles long.
5. Nearly all of the buses are empty and only 34 people in the entire neighborhood use them each day.
6. The homes along North Nevada are in a National Historic District. This extraordinarily high volume of buses are threatening to destroy those fragile homes.
7. Moving the buses to Nevada and increasing their frequency is in clear violation of the Old North End Neighborhood Master Plan that was adopted by City Council.