Posts tagged locations
Spectators urged to plan ahead for Boulder Stage of the USA Pro Cycling Challenge
Aug 24th
The USA Pro Cycling Challenge comes to Boulder Aug. 25, and will be one of the largest events in city history. More than 100,000 spectators are expected to be in town to cheer on cyclists for Colorado’s biggest bike race.
To help residents and visitors prepare for race day activities and transportation needs, city staff and the Local Organizing Committee (LOC) have developed a Boulder Stage Interactive Map (www.usaproboulder.com/map) featuring periodic road closure times along the race route and public parking locations throughout the city. RTD also will increase bus service to Boulder to provide more transit options for race spectators, and the HOP will provide free service within Boulder on Aug. 25 to make it easier for spectators to get around town to watch the race and celebrate at the race festival on Pearl Street. Service will be doubled for the BV route and on the BOLT to Longmont.
“This will be an extraordinary event for the city, and we’re excited to showcase Boulder to an international audience of cycling fans,” said City Manager Jane Brautigam. “There are going to be several optimum places to watch the race as cyclists come through the city twice, and we want to encourage everyone – residents and visitors – to plan ahead for parking, to take advantage of public transportation, and to use Boulder’s world-class bike paths during the event.”
Some event day tips include:
- Map your route in advance and know when and where roads are closed
- Arrive early and plan to spend the day in Boulder
- Identify your preferred viewing location, and be flexible
- Dress for changing weather
- Bring water and wear comfortable shoes
- Enjoy local businesses and the festival before and during the race
- Bring cash for parking, bike corrals, and the festival – No credit cards will be accepted for parking or bike corrals
- Plan to shop or eat at a local restaurant to avoid traffic delays after the event
Event parking is available throughout the city and can be found on the Boulder Stage Interactive Map (www.usaproboulder.com/map).
Paid on-street parking is available. Paid Event Parking will be available on the University of Colorado at Boulder Campus, city garages and parking lots, and at several local organizations. City parking facilities will charge $30 for event parking during Saturday’s race to help distribute parking throughout the city. The $30 parking fee will be cash only on Aug. 25. Vehicles parked illegally will be towed. Normal parking operations will resume on Sunday, Aug. 26.
Spectators who wish to park and ride bicycles or walk to the downtown events, may park for free at Stazio Field, Flatiron Park North, Pearl East Circle near the Goose Creek path and at GE Analytical Instruments in Gunbarrel. The LOC has arranged for bike corrals at Boulder High School and Casey Middle School. Bikes may be checked in for a $2 donation between 10 a.m. and 7 p.m.
CU-Boulder will have shuttles operating on race day from the CU east campus parking lots and CU main campus parking lots to the intersection of 20thStreet and Pearl Street. Parking at the main campus will be $30; parking at east campus will be $20. The shuttles are included in the parking fees (no bikes allowed on shuttles).
To view the most up-to-date parking and transportation options based on your specific needs, visit the Boulder Stage Interactive Map. The state also is announcing information about road closures throughout the region. Regional information is available at www.cotrip.org.
Please visit RTD’s main website www.rtd-denver.com to see route information for Aug. 25.
R U ready for CONE ZONE HELL in Boulder this summer??
Jun 15th
Summer transportation and utilities construction ramps up
As the summer season progresses, additional construction may be noticeable to those traveling around Boulder as the city continues to improve the community’s transportation and utilities infrastructure. Although construction projects happen throughout the year, the city schedules more work during the summer months to take advantage of warmer temperatures, longer days and less traffic. During summer 2012, construction crews will be working to replace aging waterlines, resurface city streets and improve travel options.
All active projects and the associated traffic impacts will be updated weekly at
www.boulderconezones.net. Some of the major summer construction projects with potential traffic impacts are summarized below.
2012 Street Resurfacing Projects
The city’s annual street resurfacing projects began in May and will continue through the fall. More than 60 city streets are targeted for either chip seal, resurfacing (overlay) or reconstruction in 2012. View a list and map of streets planned for resurfacing and reconstruction.
In general, these projects will involve daytime traffic impacts, intermittent lane or road closures, and parking restrictions. More streets are scheduled for resurfacing than in past summers as a result of the 2011 voter-approved Capital Improvement Bond; however, budgeting and project coordination may cause some of the projects to be put on the list for next year.
Broadway (Euclid to 18th) Transportation Improvements Project
Construction on Broadway, between Euclid Avenue and 18th Street, is currently on schedule to be completed by mid-August 2012. For more information about the project, visit www.bouldertransportation.net.
2012 Boulder Waterline Replacement Project
Beginning on Monday, June 18, and continuing through mid-November, construction crews will be working to replace corroded waterlines throughout Boulder. The annual waterline replacement project involves temporarily disconnecting then reconnecting water service.Significant delays and traffic impacts are expected while crews work across the intersection of Alpine Avenue and 19th Street during the week of June 18.
The waterline replacements will improve the city’s water distribution system, including service reliability and water quality. The city has coordinated utilities and transportation improvements so that the streets impacted by the construction will be patched after the waterlines are replaced and then repaved as part of the city’s annual pavement resurfacing program.
More information about the 2012 Boulder Waterline Replacement Project is available at www.boulderwater.net.
2012 Sanitary Sewer Rehabilitation Project
This project will begin on Monday, June 18, and involves the rehabilitation of sanitary sewer lines at various locations throughout the city. In general, motorists can expect intermittent delays, daytime lane closures and parking restrictions at the work sites. Individual work sites and times will be scheduled on a weekly basis and posted at www.boulderconezones.net. The project is scheduled for completion by September.
For the latest information on travel impacts associated with city construction projects, visit www.boulderconezones.net or follow@boulderconezone on Twitter.
CU researchers plotting the "Map of Life
May 22nd
Effort could be a key to preserving rare species
A research team involving Yale University and the University of Colorado Boulder has developed a first public demonstration version of its “Map of Life,” an ambitious Web-based endeavor designed to show the distribution of all living plants and animals on the planet.
The demonstration version allows anyone with an Internet connection to map the known global distribution of almost 25,000 species of terrestrial vertebrate animals, including mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and North American freshwater fish. The database, which continues to expand, already contains hundreds of millions of records on the abundance and distribution of the planet’s diverse flora and fauna.
“We are taking 200 years of different types of knowledge coming from different sources, all documenting the locations of species around the world and compiling them in a way that will greatly enhance our knowledge of biodiversity,” said CU-Boulder Associate Professor Robert Guralnick of the ecology and evolutionary biology department, part of the Map of Life research team. “Such information could be used by any organization that needs to make informed decisions regarding land management, health, conservation and climate change.”
The initial version of the map tool being released today is intended to introduce it to the broader public, according to the researchers. It allows users to see several levels of detail for a given species — at its broadest, the type of environment it lives in, and at its finest, specific locations where the species’ presence has been documented. One function allows users to click a point on the map and generate a list of vertebrate species in the surrounding area. More functions will be added over time, according to the team.
The bryozoa fish are found in the Connecticut River
“It is the where and the when of a species,” said Walter Jetz, associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale and the project lead. “It puts at your fingertips the geographic diversity of life. Ultimately, the hope is for this literally to include hundreds of thousands of animal and plant species and show how much or indeed how little we know of their whereabouts.”
A paper by Jetz, Guralnick and Jana McPherson of the Calgary Zoological Society describing the evolving Map of Life technology tool appeared in a recent issue of the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution.
By highlighting the known abundance and distribution of species, the researchers hope to identify and fill knowledge gaps and also offer a tool for detecting change over time. They expect the map tool will prove useful for professional scientists, wildlife and land managers, conservation organizations and the general public.
The team is using information gleaned from a wide variety of sources, including field guides, museum collections and wildlife checklists that involved scientists, conservation organizations and “citizen scientists.” The project’s success will depend on participation by other scientists and informed amateurs, and subsequent versions of the mapping tool will offer mechanisms for users to supply new or missing information about the distribution and abundance of particular species.
Snow Leopards of Tibet are nearly extinct
Jetz called the Map of Life “an infrastructure, something to help us all collaborate, improve, share and understand the still extremely limited geographic knowledge about biodiversity.” The team continues to work on several other tasks and challenges, including who will be contributing data and how information supplied by the contributors will be verified and curated.
“A small but powerful next step is to provide a means for anyone, anywhere on the globe to use their mobile devices to instantly pull up animal and plant distributions and even get a realistic assessment on the odds of encountering a particular species of wildlife,” said Guralnick, who also is the curator of invertebrate zoology at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History.
Guralnick said the Map of Life project is following in the footsteps of other knowledge repositories like the GenBank project, a National Institutes of Health-funded effort with a public database of more than 135 million gene sequences from more than 300,000 organisms that allows users to explore genes and genomes using bioinformatics tools. In the biodiversity arena, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility in Copenhagen has developed an important resource that provides access to more than 300 million records of plant and animal occurrences, which is one of the distributional databases being used by the Map of Life team.
The National Science Foundation has provided initial support for the Map of Life project. Other supporters are the Encyclopedia of Life; the International Union for the Conservation of Nature; and the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum, and the Biodiversity and Climate Research Center, both in Germany.
The public demonstration version of Map of Life can be found at http://www.mappinglife.org/ and more information about the project is available at http://www.mappinglife.org/about.
