WalkScope

Denver is in dire need of sidewalks and crosswalks that make walking safe and easy instead of daunting and dangerous. Advocates are pressing the City Council to deliver on a complete sidewalk network, and council members are listening. One of the barriers to better walking infrastructure is the lack of data. There’s no complete inventory mapping the state … Continued

After three rounds of testimony from people demanding decent sidewalks, the City Council’s Sidewalk Working Group will try to fix the dysfunctional policies that have contributed to Denver’s Swiss cheese network of crumbling sidewalks. At least one in four of all trips in Denver are less than one mile, according to the Denver Regional Council of Governments — those are trips that people can walk … Continued

Give it up for WalkScope, the crowdsourcing tool that allows anyone and everyone to map the quality of Denver’s streets. Planetizen, a popular website about urban design and planning, has rated WalkScope one of its top 10 websites of 2015. Here’s more from Planetizen: WALKscope is the rare example of crowd-sourced public engagement that actually works. WalkDenver and … 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

Data about the city’s walkability is crucial, because it drives decisions on where and how the Department of Public Works prioritizes improvements. The city of Denver doesn’t systematically measure the walkability of streets, but that’s beginning to change. Advocates and agencies have taken to the streets to record walking conditions with WalkScope, a crowdsourcing app that enables people to … 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

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

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

Livable streets advocates in Westwood, one of Denver’s worst areas for walking and biking, are taking action as the city develops a new plan for their neighborhood. Westwood Unidos, a neighborhood organization, and PlaceMatters, a think tank for city planning, performed a “sidewalk audit” on Saturday. Residents and volunteers walked the southwest Denver neighborhood, took pictures, and recorded … Continued