That was my proposed alternative I encouraged my friends to call about. I don't know how it wasn't obvious that if your goal was to increase pedestrian safety and encourage visiting your park in the middle of downtown (which was the public justification in the survey) that the best way to do that would be to get rid of the 2 highways trisecting your park. Grass them over to both remove traffic and increase park space, install meandering leisure paths through a history walk, and have local Coloradoan artists produce for a dedicated Coloradoan history sculpture park.
Oh, and if you really, really want members of the public to use your public park get rid of the helicopter parent rangers that yell at you for touching the oldest tree in Denver or for falling asleep, get rid of the signs that forbid standing still or loitering (at a fucking park of all places), and don't close off the grass areas periodically.
You could even go so far as to install more trash cans or make the bathrooms available 24/7.
It's not that the public didn't care about your fake liberty bell, it's that your park is kinda a hostile environment with shitty infrastructure.
It would cause traffic change, sure. But that change could be modeled, tested, and adapted around beforehand. Hell you can even go a step further and implement more routes for the free mall ride, move parking and traffic even further from the city center and use it as an opportunity to promote public transit. Sure nimbys would complain, cause that's what they always do, but when they see how much easier it is travel to and within downtown, how much quieter it is there, and how great the now enlarged park is surrounded by stuff to actually see and do they'll pretend like it's always been that way or that they were always for it.