The Systems: The Plans, the Planners, and the Platforms.

The Colorado Springs Safety Action Plan is the City’s master to-do list for fixing dangerous roads — which intersections kill people, which corridors have the worst crash records, which signals need retiming, which bike lanes need adding. Ranked, costed, paid for by a federal grant program that hands out money for exactly this kind of work.

It doesn’t fund Colorado Avenue specifically (we covered that funding mix in 011B). This plan is the planning side — the document that decides which corridors get prioritized for the next round of regional-sales-tax money. Yesterday’s episode showed where the bills get paid. Tonight’s shows what gets picked.

In March, the City opened the draft plan for public comment. Standard 21-day window. Anyone could read the document and leave feedback. Except the comment platform was completely broken for the first 7–8 days. The page wouldn’t load. The PDF wouldn’t open. The comment buttons didn’t work. We documented it in real time on March 11th, while it was actively failing — covered originally in Episode 9.

That left residents with roughly 15 functional days to read a 40-page federal road safety plan and respond. The City’s own standard for comparable plans — like the Annual Action Plan for Housing they ran a few months earlier — is 30 days.

We wrote a letter. Polite. Detailed. Documented the platform failures with timestamps. Asked for the comment window to be reopened for an additional 30 days. Copied the City’s accessibility coordinator, because a broken comment platform is also an ADA compliance issue under federal disability law. Sent to Colleen Guillotte, who runs the City’s Traffic Engineering office.

The City wrote back. The response was — let’s call it diplomatic. It thanked us for our interest. It noted the team’s commitment to public engagement. It did not commit to reopening the window. It did not explain what would happen next. Then it went quiet. Still waiting.

Important: the formal comment window is technically closed, but the plan has not been adopted yet. A comment to a planner before adoption is still a comment. Email lands in the same inbox the formal comments would have. Still gets read. Still becomes part of the record.

While we’re on roads. Todd Frisbie has been City Traffic Engineer for seven years. He’s the person who personally pushed for school safety zones to be expanded into middle and high schools last year — which most cities never bother to do — partly because he’s noticed that students of all ages are increasingly getting hit by drivers looking at their phones. He has publicly named distracted driving as the reason for that expansion. So he is already paying attention to the thing we want to ask him about.

The ask, in plain language: review signal timing in high-distraction corridors with the lived reality of distracted drivers as the design baseline, not a hypothetical attentive driver who no longer exists in large enough numbers. An extra half-second on the yellow phase in the right corridors would meaningfully reduce the rate at which distracted drivers run red lights and hit the people who did stop.

Second the request if it matters to you. Same inbox as Colleen: Traffic.Eng@coloradosprings.gov. Be nice. He’s already listening.

The Planning Commission (covered in 011A) set up two drainage studies last week. Tonight: what they actually do.

The first is a drainage basin planning study for the Falcon-Peyton-Ellicott corridor — eastern El Paso County, where most of the County’s growth is happening. The study will figure out where stormwater goes, where it’s supposed to go, where developers can build without making flooding worse, and how much it would cost to fix existing problems.

The second is a countywide stormwater master plan — the bigger-picture version. What infrastructure exists, what’s failing, what’s missing, what needs to be built in the next decade.

Both include a developer fee mechanism: new plats (newly subdivided land) would pay a per-impervious-acre fee to fund stormwater infrastructure on their side of the development. Existing drainage problems in already-built areas remain a public obligation the County has to fund another way — a gap the studies will help quantify.

April 29 · Falcon Library · 2:15–5:15 PM. May 7 · county building · 3:00–5:00 PM. If you live near Falcon, Peyton, or Ellicott — or really anywhere east of Powers — these are the windows when the planning frameworks get shaped before they become rules. Show up if you can.

We tested all three official pothole-reporting methods this week.

✓ Phone line — 719-385-ROAD (7623). Voicemail picked up, message left, ticket created. Not the fastest path, but reliable.

✓ Online form — coloradosprings.gov/reportpothole. About 40 seconds. Confirmation email arrived.

✗ GoCOS! app. Login failed twice. Password reset said the email wasn’t on file even though it had been used for a year. App Store reviews from recent weeks confirm a pattern.

Soft data point: 2 of 3 official tools work. The most-promoted one — the app — is the one that doesn’t. The downstream cost is real but invisible in a budget document. No line item says "the pothole app stopped working." It just shows up as fewer reports, more untreated potholes, more frustrated residents.

A lot of what this show does is sit through meetings, read PDFs, and tell you what we found. Useful — but slow, manual, and dependent on us showing up every week. The better version is a dashboard: a page where you can click your address and see what your sales tax went to last quarter, what your mill levy is, which roads are scheduled for repair, which boards have open seats. The numbers from the PDFs — live, searchable, updated as new data comes in.

Four dashboards worth knowing about right now — at cheetochopsticks.com, source on GitHub, free to fork and re-host:

✓ LIVE — Traffic safety dashboard. Built because the City’s road safety plan comment platform was broken. Crash data, corridor danger ratings, the funding pattern — the City is spending roughly 5.6× more on widening roads than on maintaining existing ones — laid out next to the crash data so you can see the gap.

✓ LIVE — Red light camera citation dashboard. 20 automated enforcement intersections across the City. Monthly counts, 2022 through Q1 2026. You can see which intersection generates the most violations, when revenue spiked, and whether the program is actually changing behavior or just collecting fines.

↺ In progress — Crime dashboard. City and County published incident data — types, district breakdowns, year-over-year. Historical depth is shallow because we’re stitching it together from quarterly press releases instead of a clean feed. Fixable, but only with help from inside the building.

↺ In progress — Mortality dashboard. County-level cause-of-death data, age cohorts, year-over-year shifts. Same caveat: we have what’s been published, not what’s been aggregated.

If you work at Colorado Springs Police Department, the Sheriff’s Office, El Paso County Public Health, the Coroner’s Office, or anywhere upstream of this data — and you have access to an aggregate feed we could pull from — please write in. A weekly CSV. A monthly export. An API endpoint. Whatever exists. We’ll handle the integration on our end.

Framing matters here: these people are busy. Genuinely. Ten records requests = ten different staff members each spending an hour pulling data by hand. One aggregate feed = one setup conversation, then the data flows on its own. Same outcome, tiny fraction of the staff time. Respect the labor of the people doing the underlying work.

The goal is simple: build the dashboards, prove they’re useful, then offer them to the City and County. If they want to host themselves — great. If they want us to keep running them — also great. If somebody downloads the repo and runs a better version under a different name — even better. Either way, residents get tools that don’t exist yet.