Denverite recently published a neat little piece on the Federal-Colfax “cloverleaf” interchange. If you have ever lived in the Denver metro, you’ve probably passed over or under this interchange. It’s a rare bit of transit infrastructure: neither Colfax nor Federal are interstates or highways, so the exchange always comes as sort of a surprise.
An on-ramp? An off-ramp? Here?!
There is, I admit, a sick pleasure in avoiding another stoplight on my commute into downtown Denver…but is the convenience of a bunch of suburbanites and other commuters really demand an interchange that “contributes to a high rate of crashes” and the death of five pedestrians between 2016 and 2020?
I don’t think so.
Good riddance to the cloverleaf!
Taylor Coe 