Joe from Estes Park writes, “What’s driving you crazy? Take a look at the intersection of Highway 34 and Madison in Loveland. It is the strangest most illogical design and a lot of people when they turn onto Madison go down the wrong way on a one way. You’ve never seen anything like it.”
Actually Joe, I’ve seen a bunch of intersections just like it around metro Denver including two new ones in Wheat Ridge and three along Santa Fe in Douglas County. This is called a Continuous Flow Intersection (CFI) where the left turn begins well before the crossroads.
That specific one in Loveland was the first CFI to be constructed in Colorado and the 111th to be constructed in the United States. Traffic engineers use them in places where they want to make left turns safer and move traffic more efficiently through an intersection…