Traffic across the Denver region has fully recovered from a pandemic slump and returned to record-high levels in 2023, the Denver Regional Council of Governments latest annual traffic congestion report says.
“Generally at the regional level, we're seeing a shift toward what those traditional commute patterns looked like before the pandemic,” said Max Monk, a DRCOG planner and author of the report.
Work-from-home rates are still much higher than they were before the pandemic, but they have slipped by 5 percentage points from the 2021 peak to about 22 percent in 2023. That suggests that the post-pandemic new normal may be slowly drifting back to the plain old normal.
But we’re not there yet: The average Denver metro resident is still driving less than they did before the pandemic, according to the report. The average vehicle miles traveled per capita was just 25 miles per day in 2023, about 15 percent lower than 2019 levels.
“We’re trying to … establish whether we're getting to this new normal, as we might call it, and if we're there yet,” said Robert Spotts, manager of DRCOG’s climate pollution reduction program. “Or, if things are still kind of evolving.”
Highway traffic is back up, but transit continues to lag.
In 2022, the morning rush hour into downtown Denver via U.S. 6 looked dramatically different than it did in 2019. There were 17 percent fewer vehicles on the road between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m. and traffic was more evenly spread across the day.
But in 2023, the 6 a.m. to 7 a.m. hour was much closer to its 2019 level — just 6.6 percent off. The evening rush has exceeded 2019 levels, as have vehicle counts across the entire day.
Use of shared e-bikes, e-scooters and other micromobility services has tripled since 2019 to more than 15,000 trips a day in 2023. Commuters are not yet flocking back to buses and rail lines though, the report says.
Monk expects transit ridership, however, to gradually grow as the Regional Transportation District begins to boost train and bus service.
But RTD has another challenge to overcome: Its rail network is largely designed to bring commuters in and out of downtown, where office vacancy rates are around 25 percent — a full 10 percentage points higher than the region at large, the report says.
“That's why you see the rail lines being hit much harder in terms of decreased ridership compared to our buses, which have really gotten near to where they were pre-pandemic,” Spotts said.
Traffic continues to worsen on Peña Boulevard near Denver International Airport, the report shows. The airport has seen record passenger counts and rapid residential and commercial growth nearby.
Economic success, “often leads to traffic congestion and overuse of facilities that aren't designed or were not originally designed to handle that much capacity,” Spotts said.
RTD’s A Line that serves the airport continues to be its most-used rail line, but it still carries a fraction of the people that Peña does — and airport officials say they want to expand the highway to accommodate more cars, buses and other vehicles.
The report predicts a traffic-y future, but that’s not a certainty.
The State Demography Office forecasts that the Denver region will grow by about 1 million people and add 700,000 jobs by 2050. DRCOG’s travel model predicts that vehicle miles traveled will increase by 40 percent by then.
“With limited intervention, such a significant increase would result in a near tripling of both vehicle hours of delay and lane miles congested for longer than three hours a day,” the report says.
But that prediction doesn’t factor in recent bills from the legislature that could reshape how cities in the Denver region are built and how people move around them. Denver, for example, wants to eliminate minimum parking requirements for new developments that could, over time, make the city denser, more walkable and more transit-friendly.
DRCOG’s planners say they will incorporate such policy changes into their models to try to understand their potential impacts.
“But it’s going to be complicated,” Spotts said.
