If you live anywhere between Colorado Boulevard and Holly Street this fall, you have probably already had the conversation. It happens at the sundial in Cranmer Park, in the parking lot before a Denver Tennis Club lesson, in the aisle at Pete's Fruits and Vegetables. Someone brings up the buses.
The Colorado Department of Transportation wants to build a Bus Rapid Transit line the length of Colorado Boulevard, from 40th Avenue down past Hampden to the Southmoor station. Hilltop sits on the boulevard's entire western flank, which means this isn't an abstract transit debate happening somewhere else in the metro. It's happening on the street that forms the edge of the neighborhood, and residents have spent this year trying to figure out what it actually means for the streets one block in.
Here's the part that surprised me once I read past the headlines: the argument in Hilltop isn't really about whether the boulevard needs to change. Almost everyone agrees it does. The argument is about who ends up living with the fix, and who actually gets to decide what that fix looks like. That second question turns out to be less obvious than it sounds.
The One Thing Almost Everyone Already Agrees On
Michael Atkins, vice president of the Hilltop Neighborhood Association, met with CDOT representatives in April ahead of the agency's second public open house on the project. His summary of where the neighborhood stands wasn't the reflexive no you might expect from a group fighting a state highway project.
"We all in the neighborhood agree that Colorado Boulevard is old, a mess, needs to be fixed, needs to be changed," Atkins said. "I think the question just becomes, 'What about it needs to change?'"
That distinction matters. This isn't a fight over whether transit investment belongs on Colorado Boulevard. Atkins has said the neighborhood would benefit from better transit options there. The fight is over design, specifically whether the corridor keeps its current number of general traffic lanes or gives some of them up to dedicated bus lanes, and what happens to the side streets if it does.
What CDOT's Own Numbers Actually Show
CDOT's May 13 open house at the Clayton Early Learning Center drew hundreds of residents, and the agency came with data that both sides have since used to make their case. The numbers are worth sitting with, because they cut in more than one direction.
| Metric | Current corridor | Under the option Glendale and Hilltop have flagged |
|---|---|---|
| Daily bus riders | about 2,800 | forecast to about 6,000 |
| Bus stops along the 7-mile route | 50 | reduced to 20 |
| Bus speed | baseline | up 20 to 30 percent |
| Southbound drive time, full corridor | about 25 minutes | about 50 minutes |
That last row is the one driving the opposition. In May 2026, CDOT's own analysis showed that one configuration featuring center and side-running bus lanes would roughly double the drive time for someone traveling the full seven miles by car. The same design that speeds up buses by a fifth to a third slows down everyone else by twice as much, at least on paper, and at least for this particular alternative among several CDOT is still weighing.
Whose Street Absorbs It
Doubling a highway's drive time doesn't make the trips disappear. It reroutes them, and the Hilltop Neighborhood Association's formal position paper, released after its board discussed the issue on June 23, names the streets it expects to inherit that traffic: Monaco Parkway and Holly Street.
Holly Street is not an abstraction here. It's the block where Kazumi Sushi and Fierce45 sit, a few doors from Locanda del Borgo, the small commercial cluster that gives Hilltop's eastern edge its only real retail texture. If regional commuters start using Holly as a bypass to avoid a slower Colorado Boulevard, that's not a traffic statistic. It's the same sidewalk people already walk to get sushi or make a Pilates class.
Glendale, whose city limits touch about a mile of the corridor, raised a related but distinct worry. City Manager Chuck Line pointed out that prioritizing north-south green lights on Colorado Boulevard would likely mean longer red lights on the east-west streets that feed Glendale's own commercial strip. "If that convenience is disrupted," he said, "it could have a significant impact on our business community." Glendale's city council voted unanimously for a "no-build" resolution not long after.
Not everyone in Hilltop lines up on the same side. Wayne Graham, who showed up to the May open house wearing a hand-lettered "No BRT" sign, told Denverite he wasn't convinced the ridership case justified the cost. "I would not spend $300 million to do it," he said. "Maybe promote the Tap-n-Ride, eliminate some of the stops, but I think CDOT just wants to have a project." Other residents at the same meeting, including transit advocate Molly Jones, argued the opposite: that safety improvements on one of Denver's highest-injury corridors are worth the tradeoff.
Who Actually Gets to Decide
Here's the detail that changes how you should think about all of this. Colorado Boulevard is a state highway. Denver's city council has not taken a formal position on the project, and neither Denver's council nor Glendale's carries the final vote. That authority sits with CDOT, working in consultation with the Federal Transit Administration.
Hilltop Neighborhood Association president Courtney Mamuscia put the neighborhood's stake in plain terms after the association met with CDOT: "The success of this project should not be measured only by bus ridership. It should also be measured by whether nearby neighborhoods remain safe, livable, and protected from cut-through traffic." That's the association's argument to CDOT directly, not to a city council vote, because a city council vote on this particular project doesn't exist.
Denver's District 5 councilwoman, Amanda Sawyer, whose district covers much of the Denver stretch of the boulevard, has voiced her own skepticism about whether CDOT has shown a clear need for a project of this scale. Her position matters for how loudly the concern gets amplified, but it doesn't carry a deciding vote either. CDOT spokesperson Tamara Rollison has described the agency's own posture plainly: "We are still in the planning process, figuring out what is the best solution for Colorado Boulevard, and we haven't gotten there yet." According to CDOT's project timeline, the agency expects to keep collecting feedback and narrowing toward a preferred design sometime between now and 2027, before any construction funding or firm schedule exists.
So if you've been directing your frustration or your support toward Denver City Council meetings, that energy is aimed at an audience that doesn't hold the pen on this one. CDOT does.
A rough timeline of how we got here this year:
- April 2026: HNA leadership meets with CDOT representatives ahead of the spring open house.
- May 13, 2026: CDOT holds its second public open house at Clayton Early Learning Center, drawing hundreds of residents from Hilltop, Glendale, and neighboring areas.
- Mid-May 2026: Glendale City Council votes 5-0 for a "no-build" resolution.
- June 23, 2026: The Hilltop Neighborhood Association board finalizes its formal position paper opposing the current proposals.
- Now through 2027: CDOT continues its alternatives analysis, aiming to identify a preferred design before moving into detailed engineering.
What This Looks Like From Cranmer Park
None of this has closed the terrace at Cranmer Park, where the sundial still tracks the hour the way it has since the plaza's 2018 restoration, or emptied the courts at the Denver Tennis Club a few blocks east, where the Denver City Open has run since 1928. The boulevard debate is loud, but it's happening around a neighborhood that is still, for now, exactly as quiet as it was last year.
What's different is that the quiet has an expiration date attached to it, even if nobody can say yet which design, or which year, that date actually lands on. If you want a say in what happens next, the venue isn't a city council chamber. It's CDOT's own public comment process, the same one that gathered roughly ninety written submissions between April and June, with public sentiment running heavily against the current alternatives. That process is still open, and it's the one place your specific address on Monaco Parkway or Holly Street actually gets weighed against a spreadsheet in Golden.
We've spent a lot of time in Hilltop over the years, watching neighborhoods change block by block rather than all at once, and this is one of those moments where staying informed matters more than staying loud. If you're trying to figure out what any of this means for your corner of the neighborhood, or you just want to talk through what you're seeing on Colorado Boulevard, The Tack Group is always happy to be a sounding board.
