The Final Design Plans have been completed. The City solicited community members to submit art design proposals for the mini-roundabout at E 3rd Ave and 32nd St in 2023. Design proposals were reviewed and recommended by the Durango Creative District and Creative Economy Commission. The final art design will be coordinated with the design team, city staff, and artist.

This project will involve designing traffic calming elements on 32nd Street from E 2nd Avenue to Holly Avenue to create a safer corridor for pedestrians and cyclists. 32nd Street is one of two minor arterial roads (the other is Florida Road) that connect the northeast side of Durango to Main Avenue making it a busy roadway for vehicles, pedestrians, and bicyclists.

The project will integrate with improvements for County Road 250/251.

Project design cost: $198,070

Project funding: 2015 Half Cent Sales and Use Tax Fund

Traffic calming is the use of roadway design elements to slow traffic speeds and improve safety for pedestrians, cyclists and vehicles. These can include:

• Vertical elements such as landscaped medians and bollards
• Narrowing of the roadway with bike lanes and reduced travel lane widths
• Pinch points created by curb extensions at crosswalks
• Traffic calming circles

Designing a roadway for slower speeds reduces the need for traffic enforcement and helps reduce the number of accidents. Traffic calming is a long-term, more equitable solution to reducing speeding. More information about traffic calming from the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) can be found here and from the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) here.

The images below show existing conditions on 32nd Street and what 32nd Street could look like with traffic calming design elements such as buffered bike lanes and intermittent landscaped medians. Design elements such as medians would be used in locations that do not restrict access to driveways, not the entire length of the roadway.

The city's Multimodal Transportation Plan has a vision of a "fully-connected transportation network that provides for an outstanding transit, bicycling and walking community in Durango." To measure this vision, we consider whether a middle-school aged child is able to safely and conveniently access transit, bike or walk independently throughout Durango. Safety, a large component of this vision, is achieved with various methods including reduction of speeds where pedestrians and bicyclists interact with vehicles.

The speed limit on 32nd Street is 25 mph, but not everyone goes 25 mph. The street’s wide open design, gives drivers a false sense of awareness and safety while travelling at higher speeds. While enforcement can help reduce speeding, improved roadway design can be a more long-term solution to slow traffic speeds.

The below image depicts the impact vehicle speed has on pedestrian fatalities based on data provided by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.