Colorado Springs City Hall is right to troubleshoot crash-prone segments of our local roadways as part of its street-safety agenda, profiled in The Gazette the other day. Hazards abound along the city’s transportation grid — for pedestrians, bicyclists and motorists alike.

Just so the city’s effort to make upgrades where needed to improve road safety doesn’t veer off track. Notably, through measures that wind up making our congested thoroughfares even less navigable for the motor vehicles that will always be their primary users.

“Traffic calming” and related measures have become common features of efforts to reconfigure transportation in cities around the country. Too often and too easily, they turn into overreaching attempts to curtail the use of automobiles.

Case in point: North Nevada Avenue in the historic Old North End Neighborhood. As The Gazette reported last week, the city’s Safety Action Plan, funded through the federal Safe Streets and Roads for All initiative, includes the creation at some point of a single-lane section of North Nevada Avenue, long advocated for by a group of that neighborhood’s residents.

A city traffic engineer told The Gazette’s news staff that piece of the plan is unlikely to happen anytime soon.

“There are a lot of factors to make implementation a challenge,” he said. Limited funding no doubt is among those factors.

And it’s just as well.

Reducing North Nevada Avenue to a single lane between the busy section north of Fillmore Avenue or Jackson Street, and the even busier section beginning at Colorado College and headed southward into downtown, simply doesn’t make sense even if some neighborhood locals long have advocated for it. 

Let’s not forget Nevada Avenue is also still Colorado 115. Squeezing the flow of motor-vehicle traffic would create an epic bottleneck along the most heavily traveled north-south traffic corridor through downtown.

Without a doubt, the pedestrian-and-bicycle campus culture of adjacent Colorado College warrants wide-ranging safety considerations. The area understandably is part of the city’s safety plan, but further talk of curtailing motor-vehicle traffic should be left out of it.

The city’s plan overall is a worthy effort to tackle a serious problem. It has the laudable goal of a 35% reduction in serious crashes by 2035.

Reengineering trouble spots identified in the plan — problematic intersections; lack of pedestrian access; obstructed views; the list goes on — should get underway. So should related steps. 

Want to target places like school zones for signage, slower speeds and increased enforcement, or implement change at tricky, busy, blind-turn intersections such as Uintah Street and Cascade Avenue to reduce traffic incidents and injuries? Sounds good. 

But let’s not confuse improving public safety with undercutting the principal purpose of streets and highways — accommodating motor vehicles. 

That might not be a fashionable policy statement these days along Colorado’s Front Range, where urban planners in many communities seem to view it as their mission to confound car and truck traffic with proliferating roundabouts, bike lanes and plastic bollards. It seems almost impolite in some circles to suggest car traffic should be prioritized. 

But it’s reality — it’s how almost all Springs residents get from Point A to Point B in their busy lives — and is likely to remain so for a long time to come. Let’s make it work.