Scooter Riders Injured on LoDo Street Slated for Bike-Lane Improvements

Rob Toftness was finishing a bike ride just after 10 p.m. on May 7 when he came upon the gory aftermath of a crash between a car and an electric scooter. "You could still see blood on the asphalt," Toftness recalls.

The crash at the intersection of 18th and Market streets sent two people who had been sharing a scooter to the hospital with serious injuries.

The intersection is in a part of LoDo where Denver's Department of Transportation and Infrastructure is now making "multimodal travel improvements," including a protected bike lane on Blake Street, according to DOTI. "We anticipate we will start work to install lines, markings and posts on Market Street before the week is up," says Nancy Kuhn, DOTI's director of communications.

An investigation into the accident is ongoing, according to Doug Schepman, a spokesperson for the Denver Police Department.

Toftness — a co-founding member of the Denver Bicycle Lobby, "a grassroots group of residents organizing for safe, connected, and equitable bicycle infrastructure," according to its website — is acutely aware of the risks that bicyclists, scooter riders, pedestrians and other non-car travelers face on Denver's streets.

During his May 7 ride, a car nearly hit him while making a fast right turn through an intersection. "There's usually something that happens," Toftness says of the near misses and close calls he experiences while on his bike. "It becomes kind of abstract."

But seeing the aftermath of a crash up close reminded him that "this is real. It's not just another tweet from the police department."

DPD tweeted about the incident just after 11 p.m. on May 7. In a response to the tweet, Toftness called the incident a "reminder of the deadly system we continue to uphold."

According to Schepman, the scooter riders had been traveling against traffic on Market and "crossed the intersection against a red light signal and were struck by a motorist going on 18th."

According to data from the city's Vision Zero dashboard, another accident at 18th and Market caused serious injuries in late 2021. And in a two-block radius of the intersection, at least 25 crashes causing serious injury have occurred over the last two years; four resulted in a death.

Traffic fatalities in Denver have increased every year since 2017 — when Denver committed to an initiative called Vision Zero, which seeks to eliminate traffic fatalities entirely. Most fatalities or serious injuries from traffic incidents have involved people in cars; since 2013, 32 people have died on bikes compared to 301 people in cars; eighteen have died on a low-power or stand-up electric scooter.

"I think these kinds of things show that these [improvements] can't come soon enough," says Toftness. The protected bike lines will provide distance between cars and bicyclists, and should also slow down traffic to make the road safer as a whole, he adds.

"White posts and rubber curbs will separate people in cars from people on bikes and scooters along Market and Blake streets," Kuhn notes. "The bike infrastructure is very visible, and it will be obvious to drivers that we have carved out space on the roadway for people on bikes and scooters to use, with the goal of improving safety for these more vulnerable road users."
The new protected bike lanes will stretch from the Cherry Creek trail to Broadway along Market and Blake — adding a total of two miles of protected bike-lane infrastructure to downtown, according to DOTI. In addition to safety improvements, DOTI says the bike lanes "will provide dedicated space on the street for people to bike and scooter, reducing concerns about scooter riding on sidewalks and improving the environment for people walking."

The project comes at the expense of 250 parking spaces.

Toftness recently praised the changes proposed in the Denver Moves Everyone plan, which aims to add 300 miles of sidewalks, 400 miles of new bikeways and 100 miles of Bus Rapid Transit corridors to Denver by 2050. The current LoDo project "furthers the goals" of that plan, according to DOTI.

Since the Denver Bicycle Lobby started in 2019, Toftness has seen a strong improvement in the city's non-car transportation infrastructure. "We understand that people are going to make mistakes," he adds, "and when that happens, it shouldn't result in a death."

But while the new infrastructure "should reduce some conflicts," Kuhn says, "it’s still critical for everyone’s safety for people to follow the rules of the road — ride in the direction of travel and adhere to traffic signals."