Press Releases
Horses become traffic
fatalities
Leroy Standish - Lakewood Sentinel
4/16/04
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Once upon a time a horse in the barn was more popular than
a car in the garage. But these days cars have the horses on
the run — in more ways than one.
Horse owner Kathleen Nelson knows too well how
incompatible horses and vehicular traffic can be. Late last
month she lost her 12-year-old Arabian Mare, Twig, when the
horse darted into traffic on West Sixth Avenue and was killed.
Two weeks before her horse died a neighbor’s horse suffered
the same fate when it broke into traffic on West Sixth Avenue.
If there had been a wall between Sixth Avenue and the neighborhood,
a wall like she and many of her neighbors have been requesting
for years, the horses would be alive today, she said.
“We need a wall,” Nelson said.
Her boyfriend Mike Smith, said in the last 27
years he’s seen Sixth Avenue grow from a thoroughfare
to a major highway.
“When we first moved in here (about a
block west of Garrison Street on West Fifth Avenue) it really
wasn’t an issue. But in the last five years it’s
really gotten bad,” Smith said.
A few years ago, he and others circulated a
petition for a wall buffering their neighborhood
from the rush of traffic, but so far it hasn’t
happened.
“There needs to be something,” he
said.
Sound walls have been installed by the Colorado
Department of Transportation along Sixth Avenue in Denver.
Those walls reached into Lakewood a couple years back and
now extend from Sheridan to Wadsworth boulevards. The state
transportation department has no plans to extend the walls.
But Sue McMahon, whose home also is near the
highway, said a wall would be nice. But she added one would
not be necessary if the speed limit was lowered.
“Short term would be to lower the speed
limit,” McMahon said. “It clearly wasn’t
designed for this speed because the entrances and exits are
too close together, and the line of sight between the main
road and the ramps is always obscured.”
According to her, a lower speed would reduce
noise and increase safety for motorists exiting and entering
the highway. At least in the short term. As population numbers
continue to rise the volume of traffic on Sixth Avenue would
be beyond any noise damping benefits of reduced speed, she
said.
McMahon has been lobbying several of her elected
representatives and CDOT to lower the speed limit on the road
after CDOT boosted the speed limit on Sixth Avenue from 55
mph to 65 mph more than a year ago.
Just recently she met with Tom Norton, director
of CDOT, Rep. Ramey Johnson, R-Golden, and others to discuss
the issue.
“We have a good dialogue going,”
McMahon said. For now, talk is about all McMahon has to show
for her efforts.
Stacey Stegman, a spokeswoman for CDOT, said
the agency is a year away from finishing a study of Sixth
Avenue, examining how the increased speed is impacting motorists
and residents.
“The only reason we are doing it is (because
of) the requests we have gotten from residents and elected
officials,” she said.
Even if those studies come back recommending
sound walls for the area, Stegman said it is unlikely CDOT
would be erecting them any time soon.
“We don’t have a budget for sound
walls,” she said.
