I’ve been biking along the Goose Creek bike path a lot over the last few months. Boulder Aikikai is out there, and so is Community Cycles, and I’ll go for a short triangular on the Boulder Creek path, 13th St. and Goose Creek when I just need to get out in the sun for a little while. Throughout the summer I was repeatedly reminded that there’s no good way to get from the path up to the east side of 30th St, and crossing 30th kind of sucks, especially when there’s any traffic. A couple of times I went so far as to go under it and the nearby railroad tracks, and then up into the parking lot, and back over the railroad tracks and through another parking lot. I’m sure this involved trespassing. And I wasn’t the only one doing it either, there was a trail worn in the grass and the gravel.
So I was stoked to hear that a ramp connecting Goose Creek to the east side of 30th was in the works, and this fall the heavy equipment came out and started making it a reality. I’ve been taking pictures as it progresses:
Throughout construction, they’ve kept the existing bike path has been open with a temporary diversion across the creek when they need to block the pavement with machinery, which is great.
There’s another project further down Goose Creek, completing the bike path which parallels Foothills Parkway on the west side:
Currently there’s a path on the east side, but not on the west, and there aren’t very many places to cross. Foothills is like a giant wall defining the eastern boundary of the city. A semi-permeable membrane beyond which… thar be office parks matey, beware!
This all might seem a little extravagant for a low-density light industrial park, but that’s because the zoning is changing drastically. Ten years from now, this will all be the Transit Village, clustered around the new RTD bus terminal and (someday, maybe) passenger rail station with trains going as far as Denver and Longmont. This is also the reason the controversial underpass by Ras Kassa’s is being built:
The Goose Creek Greenway looks like it will be the main east-west corridor through the area for anyone who isn’t driving, and north-south it will probably be Junction Place (which does not yet exist on the ground). Will definitely be interesting to see how it all turns out.
How fast do the trains go?
The trains that we’re never going to get between Boulder and Denver would take close to an hour to make the trip, compared to the 22 minutes that it’s supposed to take the BRT to make it from Table Mesa to Union Station in the managed lanes.