Drive down Colorado Avenue through the historic district right now and something feels different before you can name it. The road is narrower. There's a center lane where a whole lane of traffic used to be. Cars that once split two lanes in each direction now merge into one, and the space that opened up on the sides has turned into more parking spots, wider curb bumps, and, in a few blocks, actual places to stand that aren't asphalt.
This isn't construction crews taking their time. It's on purpose, and it's temporary, at least officially. The city calls it the Colorado Avenue Improvements Project, and what you're driving through is Phase 1: a yearlong test that started restriping the road on June 1, 2026. Whatever version of Colorado Avenue you're experiencing this month is a rough draft, not the final answer, and the city is actively collecting data to decide what the permanent version looks like when full reconstruction begins in late 2027 or early 2028.
That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should, because a cluster of business openings and closings landed on this exact stretch of street in the same few months as the lane change, and it's tempting to read all of it as one story. It isn't quite that simple, and the details are worth separating out.
Why the City Cut a Lane
The project covers roughly two miles of Colorado Avenue through the heart of Old Colorado City, cutting the road from two lanes of travel in each direction down to one, plus a center turn lane. According to city officials, the driving reason isn't aesthetics. It's crash data: the old four-lane configuration produced a steady pattern of rear-end and T-bone collisions, the kind that happen when cars are stacked two-wide and someone tries to turn left across traffic. A center turn lane pulls those movements out of the main flow.
The Colorado Springs Gazette called it the biggest change to the west-side district in 40 years, which is a big claim for a stretch of road that's mostly known for brick sidewalks and hundred-year-old storefronts. The project is funded through the voter-approved Pikes Peak Rural Transportation Authority with federal support, and it grew out of the Midland Corridor Transportation Study the city completed back in 2022. None of that is new information if you follow local planning closely, but most residents don't, which is exactly why the change on the ground has felt sudden even though it's been years in the making.
The test phase is set to run up to 12 months from that June 1 start date, which puts the decision point sometime around mid-2027. What the city does with that year of data, on speeds, traffic volume, crashes, and how people actually use the new space, determines what gets built permanently. This is not a done deal. It's an experiment, and the people driving and shopping on this street every week are, whether they signed up for it or not, the ones generating the results.
The Split Reaction on the Ground
Reactions from the businesses actually sitting on Colorado Avenue have been mixed, and the split tends to fall along a fairly predictable line: newer businesses that opened after the change tend to like it, while longer-standing ones that remember what free parking used to feel like are less convinced.
Nick Haskins, who co-owns the candle shop FFO Goods with his wife Brandi, opened their storefront in March 2026, just ahead of the restriping. Without a real baseline for comparison, he told KKTV the new configuration feels calmer, with less speeding and less noise on what used to be described by some as a drag strip.
Not everyone is sold. Nina Hamilton, who manages the bar Thunder and Buttons on the other end of the district, told the same outlet the business hasn't fully recovered from the parking changes that came with the redesign. Spaces that used to be free now require payment, and for a bar that depends on people parking close and staying a while, that shift landed differently than it did for a retail shop with quick in-and-out visits.
Neither reaction is wrong. They're just measuring different things. A shop selling candles cares about foot traffic and street noise. A bar cares about whether someone will circle the block twice looking for a spot before giving up and going elsewhere. The same road diet can genuinely improve one business's daily experience while genuinely hurting another's, and that's worth sitting with rather than smoothing over into a single verdict.
What Opened and What Left, and Why the Reasons Don't All Match
At the same time the pavement was changing, so was the tenant list on Colorado Avenue, though not all for the same reason.
Stage Stop OCC Bar & Smokehouse opened May 29, 2026, at 2925 W. Colorado Avenue, in the space that used to be Trail's End Taproom. It's run by Mark and Eve Trabandt Childers, who also own the original Stage Stop Cantina, Rentals & Stables out on Old Stage Road. Eve runs the kitchen, and the barbecue-forward menu closely mirrors what's served at the original location.
Pizzeria Leopold, the Lakewood pizzeria that won Denver's 2025 pizza bracket, opened a second location in Old Colorado City this August. It comes with a rooftop patio looking out over the mountains, a genuine rarity for a district built mostly at street level. Owners Chris and Lindsay Lyons named the original restaurant after their oldest child and have built a small regional following on a hybrid pizza style that blends East Coast and Italian-American influences.
On the other side of the ledger, Gather Food Studio & Spice Shop, a longtime fixture at 2011 W. Colorado Avenue, announced it's closing and relocating entirely to Minnesota. Owners Cortney Smith and David Cook framed the move as a family decision rather than a business one, saying they're carrying the shop into a new chapter rather than shutting it down for good.
Hapke's Hortum, the boutique houseplant shop, left Old Colorado City altogether this summer, moving to a new storefront at 101 N. Tejon Street downtown at the end of June. Owner Clay Hapke said the old space had become a little stagnant and that the new location, with south-facing windows and roughly twice the square footage, gives his tropical plant collection better light and gives customers more room to move through a shop that used to feel cramped.
It would be a cleaner story if all of this traced back to the road project, but the record doesn't support that. Gather's move is about family, not foot traffic. Hapke's move is about square footage and sunlight, not parking meters. What the timing does show is that Old Colorado City's business turnover this summer was busier than usual in both directions, arriving and leaving, at the exact moment the street itself was being reshaped. Some of that is coincidence. Some of it, particularly a rooftop restaurant betting on a slower, more walkable street, looks like a business reading the redesign and leaning into it.
The One Thing That Didn't Change
Through all of this, the Old Colorado City Farmers Market kept its rhythm. It's been running at Bancroft Park for more than 40 years, and this season brought new ownership: Zack Quintana, a longtime vendor known for his Palisade peaches, took over as owner in 2026. The market still runs Saturdays from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. from June through October, with close to 90 vendors, food trucks, and live music filling the park each week. Quintana told KKTV this year's dry, warm winter pushed an early bloom, meaning cherries and other produce that usually show up later in the season arrived on opening day instead.
It's a small detail, but it's a useful anchor. While the road outside was being restriped and a handful of storefronts changed hands, the market at the center of the district kept doing exactly what it's done for four decades, just under new ownership that grew up inside the same system.
Watching a Pilot Program Happen in Real Time
The easy mistake here is treating this summer's version of Colorado Avenue as the finished product. It isn't. The city is explicitly gathering data on speeds, traffic volume, and crash patterns during this window, and that data feeds directly into the permanent redesign scheduled for 2027 or 2028. Local advocacy groups like Bike Colorado Springs have already weighed in publicly, pushing for dedicated bike infrastructure that isn't currently part of the plan, which is a reminder that the design you're driving through today is still open for argument.
If you live here, park here, or run a business here, the next several months are the part of the process where your actual experience gets recorded and used. That's a different kind of stake than most road projects offer residents. Most of the time you find out about a redesign after it's already permanent. This time, the test is happening in public, on a street you probably drive every week, and the data collection window closes sometime around mid-2027.
Whatever verdict comes out of it, the version of Colorado Avenue you know right now, lane configuration, paid parking, rooftop pizza and all, is a working draft. Worth remembering next time someone tells you what Old Colorado City is "like" these days. Ask them when they last drove through.
I'm Kevin James Bond, and I've lived in Colorado Springs since 1992, which means I've watched this exact stretch of road change more than once. If you ever want to talk about how a corner of the Pikes Peak region is shifting, whether that's a road project, a new restaurant, or something closer to a real estate question, reach out. Let's Connect.
