Construction crews will soon begin removing two lanes of traffic from Mississippi Avenue between Eliot and Quivas streets, putting the major arterial on a road diet after years of delays.
It’s the latest effort by the city to slow traffic and make roads safer — and it’s happening even as residents battle over a similar plan on Alameda Avenue.
The Denver City Council is set to approve a construction contract in the coming weeks, with the goal of finishing the road diet by 2027.
Currently, the one-mile strip of Mississippi is five lanes wide — two lanes traveling each direction and a dedicated middle turn lane. The road is lined by a mix of homes, an elementary school and strip malls.
With the redesign, the city will remove a travel lane in each direction, bringing the road down to three lanes. The city also will install raised medians, intersection improvements and signal modifications.
The project is expected to cost about $3.8 million.
Road diets are meant to slow traffic, reducing car crashes, injuries and deaths. Mississippi is on Denver’s High Injury Network, a group of roads responsible for 50 percent of traffic deaths in the city. Road diets can be controversial, with critics arguing they are inconvenient for drivers or push traffic to other roads.
The project has been long delayed.
The Mississippi project has been in the works since 2022, and at one point was expected to be finished by the end of 2023.
But several complications disrupted the process. First, the city needed to buy property along the road to make way for construction.
A funding shortage also delayed the project.
There was also the fact that no one wanted to build the project. When the city requested construction bids in 2025, no companies responded. When DOTI tried again in November, it found a contractor. That contract needs to be approved by the Denver City Council.
The setbacks have Denver City Council member Flor Alvidrez on edge, especially after the city delayed a similar project in her district on Alameda Avenue. DOTI watered down the Alameda project after pushback from residents, including a member of the wealthy Anschutz family.
“Trust is built through follow-through,” Alvidrez said. “Whether DOTI earns that trust on Mississippi will depend on how they execute this project and how responsive they are to community concerns as it moves forward.”
Alvidrez said she has not heard of any organized pushback against the Mississippi project. DOTI officials said they last reached out to community members in 2023, when the project was being designed.
