road widening

Traffic fatalities are up 29 percent this year in Denver with 37 dead already compared to 29 at this point in 2018. The numbers grew last week after drivers killed two pedestrians in Denver and a third in Aurora after a frightening hit-and-run Saturday night.

Back in February, Michael Hancock told a room full of sustainable transportation advocates, “We need to absolutely transform our city from a car-focused, automobile-centric system, to a people-centric transportation and mobility network.” Fast forward four months, and Hancock and the Denver City Council may do the exact opposite by spending $27 million to widen 56th Avenue … Continued

Engineers know that wide city streets with wide lanes are dangerous — those are the streets where people get killed by speeding drivers. But when people confronted Denver’s transportation agencies about the widening of Federal Boulevard, Colorado DOT and Denver Public Works blew off their safety concerns. Making the street safer for walking, they said, would ruin the whole … Continued

Denver’s ABC affiliate, 7News, has a very cleverly titled column called “Driving You Crazy” (it’s mostly about what makes drivers crazy — get it?). Sometimes traffic reporter Jayson Luber wanders into transit territory — like when he empathized with a reader who can’t stand “gabby females” on the No. 15 bus. But mostly Luber hands a megaphone to motorists enraged over … Continued

As Streetsblog Denver reported last week, Colorado DOT and the Department of Public Works are adding space for car traffic on Federal Boulevard in the name of safer walking and biking. The premise that widening a street will improve safety goes against a mountain of evidence and experience. And in fact, if you dig a little deeper into … Continued