WalkDenver

For Denver’s low-income residents, walking, biking, and transit are not “alternative transportation” choices — they are the only choices. The lower the neighborhood’s income, the higher the need for walkability and bikeability, yet the worse it is to walk or bike. Enter the Community Active Living Coalition, led by Denver Health, the Department of Environmental Health, and WalkDenver. They’ve … Continued

Denver is just beginning to recover from decades of car-first planning. Making the city walkable will take big changes, like a legitimate way to fund a sidewalk network and a much more aggressive approach to reducing traffic deaths and serious injuries on our streets. Campaigns like those are marathons. They take years to unfold and change the … Continued

Denver’s transit network is growing, but no government body has taken responsibility for improving access to train stations and bus stops — not RTD, not Denver Public Works, not the Colorado Department of Transportation, not Denver’s elected officials. It’s the city’s low-income residents who bear the brunt of this failure. Those are the findings from a report released today by the transit advocates at Mile … Continued

Chaffee Park is a north Denver neighborhood scrunched between three highways. Like a lot of neighborhoods in the city, it suffers from street designs that prioritize the movement of car traffic over the safety of people. People who walk in the neighborhood know it’s a terrible and dangerous pedestrian environment. Now a new study maps out those problems block-by-block. … Continued

West Colfax Avenue suffers from an identity crisis. It was designed to move motor vehicles in and out of the city as fast as possible, but it’s also a neighborhood street where bus riders, families, and shoppers abound. The result is a thoroughfare that caters to motorists, but not to the people who actually live, work, and walk there. … Continued

For six hours this Sunday, part of West Colfax Avenue will be transformed from a four-lane, car-heavy thoroughfare into a three-lane complete street for people. It’ll be a temporary road diet (built with temporary materials) that demonstrates how simple street design can have an outsize effect on a neighborhood’s safety and sense of place. Streetsblog Denver covered the demonstration, … Continued

Colfax Avenue: the “longest, wickedest street in America.” For a while now, it’s been becoming less like a state highway for cars, and more like a vibrant, urban street for people. Yet it’s far from the pedestrian paradise that WalkDenver, the city’s preeminent pedestrian advocacy group, envisions. The group has long focused its attention on the city’s … Continued

The City and County of Denver doesn’t have a dedicated funding stream for building and maintaining sidewalks, but WalkScope, a crowdsourcing tool that maps and rates Denver’s walking infrastructure, could be the springboard the city needs to change that. WalkScope allows anyone with access to a smart phone or computer to map the quality of … Continued

Complete streets advocates are taking ownership of West Colfax by transforming part of it from a four-way car-centric raceway into a haven for pedestrians and people on bikes. It’ll be just a one-day demonstration — organizers describe it as a “lab” — but the idea is to spark a permanent redesign on the street by showing residents, city planners, … Continued