When Craig Patterson and his wife moved to the wealthy Denver suburb of Bow Mar eight years ago, they felt safe letting their son and daughter roam its winding, leafy roads. Then cars started crashing into everything.
There was the woman who plowed into a rock wall at the entrance to town. An S.U.V. that rammed a roundabout. The drunk landscaper who took out a pine tree and mailbox a few doors down from the Pattersons.
All were among the many drivers who cut through Bow Mar to avoid clogged main roads. But to a quiet town founded as a bedroom community of Denver in the 1940s, they represent an unwelcome encroachment of the region’s explosive growth that has reached a full-blown border crisis.
Now Bow Mar has an idea: keep out the traffic by gating off its serene streets.
Bow Mar residents have packed town meetings this year in support of gates, calling them a public safety necessity. But critics say Bow Mar, a town of $3 million homes with its own private lake, is trying to escape the downsides of growth by walling itself off — an idea that rankles some in liberal Colorado as a miniature border barrier.
“That fancy little town in the metro area doesn’t want us peasants driving through anymore,” Kyle Clark, a local news anchor, told viewers in a recent segment that first reported on the plans and still has Bow Mar residents angry.
The fight echoes conflicts across the fast-growing Western United States about whether to welcome newcomers or beat them back like invasive weeds. There is a boom in bumper stickers and T-shirts that declare: Don’t California My Arizona (or Texas or Idaho). A jokey new online shop called Wyoming Border Patrol urges a wall to keep Coloradans from migrating north.
While thousands of gated communities across the country have their own privately maintained roads, Bow Mar’s plan to block its public streets would make it the rare gated town. Residents would get radio tags allowing them passage and key codes to give to their guests. Emergency vehicles would also have access.
Bow Mar initially proposed building three gates and closing off an additional public street, but in a statement, the town said that it was gating off only one entry into the town, and that drivers could still take other routes in. The mayor and town trustees declined an interview request.
“This is not an effort to privatize public streets,” the town said in a statement.
The larger cities of Denver and Littleton, which surround Bow Mar, do not see it that way. They say that Bow Mar cannot restrict public streets that are funded in part by state tax dollars.
“It’s hurtful when your neighbor says, You’re not welcome in our community,” said Kyle Schlachter, the mayor of Littleton, a city of 46,000.
Mr. Schlachter said he first learned about the gate plan last winter from a puzzled Littleton resident who had caught wind of the proposal. Littleton and Bow Mar have cooperated on road projects and wastewater treatment over the years, and Mr. Schlachter said he had reached out to Bow Mar to negotiate a non-gate option, such as tougher traffic enforcement or more speed bumps. He said the town had declined.
Mr. Schlachter said he worried any gate could slow emergency vehicles and make other roads even more congested. But more than that, he said, it would be unfair, because Bow Mar’s residents drive on Denver or Littleton streets every time they leave their one-square-mile town.
“They want to be able to use our roads, but they don’t want us to use their roads,” he said. “Do we need to put up gates of our own?”
As the gate debate has ricocheted across the internet, some Bow Mar residents say they have been slandered online as snooty elitists. They have spotted pickup trucks “rolling coal” through town, belching black clouds of diesel smoke.
“We just want to keep our kids safe,” said Dawn Fable, who has lived in the town for 10 years. “They’re not able to play outside. Someone is going to die.”
There have been two crashes in the Fables’ front yard. One happened on an evening last October, when a truck gunning down the road almost hit their 12-year-old son as he changed a bike tire.
The truck crashed into a mailbox across the street, and when Ms. Fable’s husband, Shane, ran out with his phone to record the scene, he found the driver with blood on his face, slurring his words. The man was arrested on charges of reckless driving and vehicular assault for driving while drunk, according a police report.
“I never wanted to live in a gated community,” Mr. Fable said, “but it is out of control.”
Apart from the occasional runaway truck, Bow Mar feels like a suburban Brigadoon.
It is a quilt of sprawling one-story homes sitting on one-acre lots under a canopy of mature ash trees, with no businesses other than a tiny marina along the private lake. During the day, joggers huff along gravel walking trails, and parents in golf carts pick up their children from the bus stop. It has no sidewalks or streetlights, and at night, the streets are swallowed in darkness.
“You move here to let your kid enjoy being a kid,” said Mr. Patterson, the father of two. He said his sense of safety was first jolted about five years ago, when an unfamiliar silver car sidled up alongside his daughter, then 11, as she and a friend walked down the road and the driver tried to lure them in by offering a ride.
Bow Mar says the number of nonresident drivers has soared as metro Denver has exploded over the past decade and new apartment buildings have spread across the suburbs. The town tried lowering the speed limit to 20 miles per hour and installing speed bumps, to no avail.
A traffic study commissioned by the town found that about 2,000 vehicles entered on an average day last year, a roughly 25 percent rise from 2017. The police issued 1,260 traffic violations, half of them speeding tickets, from the start of 2023 through this summer — a big number in a town of just 850 people, 193 of them children under 15.
Some residents have responded to the traffic by planting “SLOW DOWN” signs in their yards, installing boulders along property lines as traffic breaks or hiding GoPro cameras in the bushes. One father is so worried about out-of-control drivers, he said, that he no longer lets his daughters go to the family’s roadside mailbox.
The pro-gate contingency got another data point in their favor last week, when a gray S.U.V. drove into the lake and ended up stuck in three feet of water. A Bow Mar spokesperson said the driver — who appeared to have fled the scene — wasn’t a resident.
The post A Colorado Town Was Beset by Traffic. Its Fix Led to a Border Battle. appeared first on New York Times.
