Denver pedestrian advocates feel like they’re on a losing streak lately.
The car-free or car-lite “shared streets” the city opened during the pandemic have almost all been returned to the roar of traffic. Most recently, cars are again rolling through the 2900 block of Larimer Street in the River North Arts District.
¡Viva! Streets Denver, which for a handful of Sundays in 2023, closed miles of Broadway and Welton Street to traffic so thousands of people could more freely walk, bike, and scoot instead, has been on hiatus. The car-free First Friday art walk on Sante Fe Drive is also in peril.
These changes and others have sparked protests, petitions and plenty of online chatter among car-resistant Denverites. The city’s role in them also disappointed Denver's foremost street safety advocate.
“I can't say it's an intentional attempt to quash those events,” said Jill Locantore, executive director of the Denver Streets Partnership. “But it does seem like a terrible missed opportunity for the city to support those events, which have proven to be wildly popular and seem so well aligned with the mayor's interest in revitalizing downtown.”
But Denver’s top transportation official said Mayor Mike Johnston remains committed to the climate, equity and safety-focused vision adopted by former Mayor Michael Hancock that called for a significant shift away from cars.
“The city is still, under the leadership of Mayor Johnston under myself and [in] collaboration with the community, very much focused on how we create multimodal choice and encourage people to think differently about how we move around the city,” Department of Transportation and Infrastructure Executive Director Amy Ford said in an interview.
Ford cited logistics and safety, not a pro-car policy, for recent changes.
The Sante Fe First Friday event and ¡Viva! Streets Denver are both hosted by outside organizations and permitted by the city.
The city is trying to work through concerns with organizers of the Sante Fe event, as Denverite reported last month, and could still go forward later this year.
A return of ¡Viva! Streets Denver in its original 2023 form, which was criticized by some local businesses who reported a decline in revenue, will not happen this year, Ford said. But a modified version could happen this year or next.
“The goal is absolutely to try to start ¡Viva! Streets again,” Ford said.
The Downtown Denver Partnership, which organized the event, has not yet replied to a request for comment.
The 2900 block of Larimer Street re-opened to traffic because no neighborhood entity applied for a permit to keep it closed. The department is not considering re-closing the street on its own volition, but stands “at the ready to partner with community should they want to be able to do that,” Ford said.
Locantore called that a disappointing position, citing a community feedback survey by the RiNo Business Improvement District that showed more than 90 percent of the 2,300 respondents supported the continued closure of the block.
“It’s incredibly rare to get that level of support,” Locantore said. “Of course there is 5 percent to 10 percent who are upset, but you're never going to please everybody. But it's also really rare that you get to please 90 percent of the population all at once. And so why are they letting this opportunity go?
The city is moving forward with its own “shared streets” elsewhere, including 21st Street near Coors Field, Acoma Street in the Golden Triangle, and is studying changes to Wynkoop Street near Union Station.
While each project will be different, the city describes a shared street as being designed to create “safe and comfortable spaces that are pedestrian oriented,” but where cars would still be allowed.
DOTI also wants to explore converting downtown Denver’s one-way streets, some of which have been narrowed in recent years with protected lanes but are generally relatively high-speed thoroughfares, into two-way streets, Ford said.
The city also will roll out speed cameras on two of Denver’s busiest and most deadly roads: Federal Boulevard and Alameda Avenue. Ford said those could be installed as early as this summer.
Ford says the city’s committed to its big, visionary transit and walking goals. But Mayor Mike still sees a place for cars, too.
The lengthy Denver Moves Everyone 2050 plan, which was published in the waning days of the Hancock administration, sets goals of raising the share of trips made by walking, rolling or biking to 20 percent and transit to 15 percent.
More recently, the Johnston administration adopted a goal of shifting 160,000 car trips to walking, biking or transit this year — that’s about one trip a week per household.
“That would also keep us on path to some of the very big goals that we have,” Ford said.
Locantore criticized that goal as a “mathematical restatement” of the city’s existing target. She credited Johnston for the advancement of the voter-passed sidewalk program, construction of bus rapid transit on East Colfax Avenue, and the city’s new bicycle plans. But she said she’s still waiting for Johnston to articulate his own transportation vision.
“What does he hope to accomplish during his term, other than just allowing what got started under Hancock to continue?” she asked.
Transportation was not a top-tier issue in Johnston’s campaign, but he did briefly lay out his thinking recently in an interview on City Cast Denver. He said that most of Denver may remain car-dependent, but he described a vision of developing denser and better-connected “nodes.”
“What we have to do is focus on developing nodes or neighborhoods that are walkable and bikeable that are built around the city,” Johnston said. “And what you can try to do is maybe take public transit to or from those places. And if you live there, you can walk around that space.”
That vision is made more difficult by Denver’s and the Regional Transportation District’s historic decisions not to build light- and commuter-rail lines into the city’s neighborhoods. But Johnston mentioned several transit-rich sites, like the Central Park RTD station and the East Colfax corridor, where the city is trying to focus more development.
Outside of those places, though, cars will be necessary, Johnston said.
“So we're trying to focus on a handful of places we can really build housing density to match the public transit infrastructure and build up around those, knowing we can't yet replace cars for families who have to go to four or five different places in the city on a given day,” he said.
