Colorado Avenue Slowed Down This Summer. Here's What Actually Changed in Old Colorado City

"Nobody wanted the paid parking." Nina Hamilton has said some version of that sentence all summer. She manages the bar at Thunder and Buttons, one of the anchor businesses on the west end of Old Colorado City, and when a reporter asked her about the new traffic pattern on Colorado Avenue in early August, that's where she went first. Not the lanes. Not the speed. The meters.

That response tells you something the traffic engineers' press releases don't. Colorado Springs spent the summer running a real experiment on its own Main Street, and the neighborhood living through it is having two different conversations at once: one about whether the road is safer, and one about whether it costs more to park in front of the businesses that make Old Colorado City worth visiting. Those two conversations started at different times, and untangling them is the only way to understand what's actually different about the neighborhood right now.

What Actually Changed on the Ground

Beginning June 1, city crews restriped a stretch of Colorado Avenue running from Limit Street through the historic core to around 30th Street, working east to west a few blocks at a time. The project cut the road from four travel lanes to three: one lane in each direction plus a center turn lane. It's a one-year test, part of a $375,000 first phase funded through the Pikes Peak Rural Transportation Authority extension voters approved in 2022, and the city has been explicit that it's collecting data on speeds and crashes before deciding whether to make the change permanent.

Ryan Phipps, the city's capital improvements manager, has pointed to a specific safety problem driving the redesign: a four-lane configuration on Colorado Avenue produced a lot of rear-end and T-bone collisions, and a center turn lane pulls those turning movements out of the flow of traffic. City staff gathered early input from residents at Territory Days over Memorial Day weekend, then rolled the new striping out block by block through June.

The visible changes go beyond the lane count. The redesign opened up roughly 30 additional curb parking spaces by allowing cars to park along longer stretches of the street. In July, the city added temporary concrete islands in the new center lane to help pedestrians cross, with extra protection at the Colbrunn Court crosswalk and three more islands installed between Colbrunn and Limit.

Here's the short version of what's different if you drive Colorado Avenue regularly:

• One through-lane in each direction instead of two, with a center turn lane
• About 30 new metered curb spaces along the corridor
• New pedestrian islands near Colbrunn Court and westward toward Limit
• Restriping is temporary. Full streetscape reconstruction is scheduled for 2027 or 2028, built on what this year's test shows

The Businesses Feeling It First

For the merchants along the strip, the change arrived as a lived experience before it arrived as a statistic. Anna Holloway of Sweetwater Flower Market ended up relocating the shop half a block away and across the street, in part to stay ahead of how the curb in front of her original spot was being reconfigured. She's watched the traffic from both locations.

"We have full glass in the front so we see a lot of people driving by and we feel like traffic has slowed down and people just seem to be taking it a little bit more slow," Holloway said.

Emma Hunter, a manager at the boutique Eclectic further up the road, described the same shift in the feel of the street rather than in any number she's tracking. Traffic that used to feel intense and prone to speeding now feels calmer, and she thinks that's brought more people out walking. Nick and Brandi Haskins, who opened FFO Goods in March, just a few weeks before the restriping began, don't have a real before-and-after to compare against. They only know Colorado Avenue as it is now, and what they see, they like.

Phipps has backed up the anecdotes with what the city is measuring: traffic through the demonstration zone generally holds closer to the posted limit, and speeds noticeably tick back up the moment drivers exit the configuration heading toward downtown. That's the kind of before-and-after signal a road diet is designed to produce, and on the metric the project was built to fix, it appears to be working.

The Parking Fight Predates the Pilot

Here's where the story most people are telling about this summer gets it slightly wrong. The friction over paid parking that businesses like Thunder and Buttons are describing didn't start with this year's lane restriping. Paid meters went into several Old Colorado City lots years earlier, and the frustration Hamilton is voicing traces back further than the orange cones on Colorado Avenue.

What did change this year is how that existing paid parking gets managed. In late July, the city's Parking Enterprise launched a rebrand called "Now You Know," swapping individual parking meters along Colorado Avenue and downtown's Tejon Street for shared kiosks that each cover five to ten spaces at once, plus new tap-to-pay and text-to-pay options on top of coins, credit cards, and the ParkMobile app. The pricing structure now runs in three color-coded zones: yellow, at $1.50 an hour, covers the busiest core blocks in both downtown and Old Colorado City; green drops to $1.25; blue, on the periphery, is $1.00.

For Hamilton, the kiosk swap and the extra curb spaces don't answer the actual complaint. She'd rather see the spaces in front of Old Colorado City's older storefronts go back to free, arguing the business hasn't fully recovered from paid parking taking over spots that used to cost nothing.

"We would really like to go back to free parking," she said.

The city's counterargument, which Parking Enterprise Manager Alyssa Alt has made in public statements, is that every dollar collected gets reinvested into the districts that generate it, funding things like the kiosks themselves, garage maintenance, and streetscape work. Whether that math satisfies a bar manager watching foot traffic on a Tuesday afternoon is a different question than whether the lanes are safer, and this summer's coverage has largely blurred the two.

Cyclists Got a Consolation Prize, Not a Lane

The other tradeoff baked into the redesign involves bikes, and it's a deliberate one. Colorado Avenue has no bike lanes in the current plan, and none are planned for the Limit-to-30th corridor. Instead, the city is steering cyclists a block north to Pikes Peak Avenue, designated as a calmer parallel route.

Nicole Odell, who advocates for Bike Colorado Springs, supports the safety improvements on Colorado Avenue but has pushed back on the alternative. She's pointed out that the bike lane crossing the Colorado Avenue bridge from downtown simply ends once riders reach Old Colorado City, dumping them onto Pikes Peak Avenue, a street she describes as pothole ridden with a stop sign at nearly every block. City planners have defended the choice by noting that public input during the underlying corridor study showed a stronger appetite for parking than for bike lanes, a tradeoff that shows up in the finished design whether or not every rider agrees with it.

The Vote That Could Outlast the Pilot

The most consequential thing happening in Old Colorado City this month isn't on the pavement at all. It's on the Colorado Springs City Council agenda for August 25.

Voters created the Old Colorado City Downtown Development Authority in a November 2024 special election, approving the authority itself by a wide margin while narrowly rejecting a mill levy that would have given it a dedicated funding source. The district covers roughly 425 businesses and 250 residential properties along the Colorado Avenue corridor. It sat mostly dormant for a year before the city finally seated a full governing board in December 2025, and it still hasn't finished a single development plan.

That inaction is now the central argument on both sides of a dissolution fight. The council put dissolution on its agenda in mid-July with less than a week's notice to the authority, then voted 5-4 to delay the decision into August rather than kill it outright. Allison Daniell, the DDA's vice chair, described the uncertainty bluntly.

"It's still hanging over our heads. It's just a little bit higher up than it was," Daniell said.

Ryan Lloyd, an architect who owns The Sluice, the 1859 building on Colorado Avenue that's the oldest standing structure in Colorado Springs, was among the organizers who pushed for the authority's creation in the first place. If the council votes to dissolve it on the 25th, Old Colorado City's only remaining funding tool would be its existing Special Improvement and Maintenance District, which covers landscaping, snow removal, and basic upkeep, not the kind of corridor investment the DDA was designed to make possible.

The timing is what makes this worth watching if you live here. The Colorado Avenue demonstration is scheduled to run for up to a year before the city finalizes its permanent design for 2027 or 2028. The agency that was supposed to help translate a year of resident feedback into that permanent design, and to fund the kind of streetscape work that goes beyond restriping, may not exist by the time the data comes in.

Whatever the council decides, the three lanes, the new curb spaces, and the kiosks stay put through next spring at the earliest. The neighborhood is living inside an unfinished experiment either way, and the businesses along Colorado Avenue are the ones deciding, block by block, whether it's working.

If you're watching how a neighborhood like this changes over time and want a read on what it means for property values, timing, or your own plans, the team at Strategic Property Advisors tracks these shifts across Colorado Springs and the Front Range closely. Reach out anytime to talk through what's happening in your corner of the market.