Jill Locantore

Mayor Hancock’s preliminary budget fails to fully fund the city’s transportation priorities for 2020 — and the City Council must make more money available to save lives and improve how people get around the city, activists said Wednesday.

A celebrated transit planner who is so talented that he even got Houston bus ridership to increase may not be able to bring the same success to Denver for one simple reason: politics.

This year, drivers have already killed 26 people, far outnumbering the 15 traffic fatalities at this point last year.

Yesterday the City Council finally dug into the question of how to complete Denver’s patchwork sidewalk network. Sidewalk construction and maintenance currently falls entirely on individual property owners. It’s a policy designed to fail, with many people unable to afford sidewalks, and the quality of the pedestrian environment suffering as a result. People pay with their lives. … Continued

How far has the Colorado Department of Transportation come since its days as the Colorado Department of Highways? Not very far, judging by Denver’s high-speed, state-owned streets like Colfax and Federal. While Colorado DOT Director Shailen Bhatt talks a good game, the agency he runs has shown almost no inclination to create walkable, bikeable, transit-oriented streets … Continued

When Mayor Michael Hancock committed to ending traffic deaths and serious injuries under the banner of Vision Zero, he launched an “action plan” to start the process and called on advocates to help. WalkDenver Policy Director Jill Locantore is one of those advocates. She’s also part of the budding Denver Vision Zero Coalition. Locantore went … Continued

The RTD Board of Directors offered Interim General Manager and CEO Dave Genova the permanent post late last week after the career RTD employee beat out two outsiders for the job. Phil Washington left the agency to run LA Metro in Los Angeles, and his legacy centers around FasTracks, the massive, voter-approved expansion of the region’s rail … Continued

University of Colorado professor Ken Schroeppel is teaching his graduate students how to become urban planners. That means teaching them the tenets of walkability — how to identify gaps in the city’s walking network and how to reorient streets to prioritize pedestrians. So Schroeppel, who runs DenverUrbanism on the side, gave his students a pretty cool assignment that could … Continued