Have Thoughts About the Denver Moves Everyone Plan? Share Them by March 3

Riley LaMie, principal city planner with the Denver Department of Transportation & Infrastructure, thinks of the Denver Moves Everyone plan as the department’s North Star. For that reason, the department has worked hard to include as many people in the planning process as possible, reaching all of Denver’s neighborhoods and more than 10,000 residents.

“This outreach helped us to hear and understand the collective values that are really important to Denverites, and that helped us to develop the plans, goals and vision,” LaMie says. “Through that, we also heard people's hopes and concerns for the future, as well as their priorities for improving the transportation system.”

The Denver Moves Everyone plan is a collective transportation vision for the city. It’s an update of the city’s Strategic Transportation Plan, which was last updated in 2008. There have been four phases of public comment; the final stage, in which people can comment on the full draft plan, closes on March 3.

Submissions can be made at the bottom of the Denver Moves Everyone website.

“A good part of this is that they really did reach a lot of different people,” says Rob Toftness of the Denver Bicycle Lobby. “It wasn't just a few Zoom meetings here and there. … It took a lot of work on their part, and it shows.”

The plan looks forward from the present to 2050, taking stock of the current state of transportation in Denver and setting goals for the future. Those goals include reaching zero traffic fatalities and cutting greenhouse gas emissions from the city’s transportation system.

If the plan’s vision is fulfilled, by 2050 there would be 300 more miles of sidewalks, 400 miles of new bikeways and 100 new miles of Bus Rapid Transit corridors. That’s along with updating and maintaining current infrastructure and adding additional greenery to the city’s streets and alleys.

Toftness, who participated in stakeholder meetings during the planning process, says that if the goals proposed in the plan actually happen, it could be transformative.

“If it's just pretty diagrams on the page, then it doesn't help us, but if we have a new administration that comes through and really does stick to their guns and sticks to the goals in here, I think it could be a real benefit,” he says.

The plan notes that currently, over 25 percent of Denver’s land area is dedicated to transportation, with 80 percent of that space dedicated to cars and only 20 percent dedicated to pedestrians, cyclists, buses and trains. Toftness found it encouraging that the city was clear about the uneven nature of the system right now.

“The numbers by themselves show that we still drive in single occupancy vehicles too much, so there's always going to be a bias toward that,” he says. “But I thought, for the most part, the plan did a really good job of reaching out to a lot of folks and really emphasizing, ‘Hey, we can't continue doing things the same way we have been doing them.’”

Still, those who want to be sure the final plan reflects what the community wants can still comment by March 3, and their comments will be considered in the final plan.



“Mostly, it's a great plan,” says Danny Katz, executive director of the Colorado Public Interest Research Group. “But there's this one piece that seems pretty important to improve.”

Katz and his organization are rallying support for a change to the short-term goals included in the plan, designed to be set in motion by 2030. Those goals envision five Bus Rapid Transit projects that would dedicate a lane to buses and have frequent, fast service along some of the city’s main roads. However, the lines won’t connect to each other in the short term.

“The Colfax segment will run from East Colfax to Broadway, and it stops and does not go from Broadway to Federal,” Katz describes. “The Federal segment goes from south up north and stops around 26th. It doesn't actually get up to where Speer connects to Federal or where 38th connects. The Speer piece stops at Broadway and doesn't actually get up to Federal.”

Katz points out that most people don’t just want to travel from one end of a road to another; they may want to move other directions. Plus, the area that won’t be connected in the short term will look very different in 2030 because of ongoing and planned development.

“If there's any place we should be making sure there's BRT connections and network, it's gotta be there,” he says. “It's actually crazy when you think of the transformation that area is going through.”

The unconnected area would include Sun Valley, which is currently being redeveloped with denser housing by the Denver Housing Authority. It also includes the Mile High Stadium District Master Plan, which has planned development for the area south of the Broncos stadium and both the River Mile and Ball Arena projects on the other side of the South Platte River. Those projects will drastically change over 150 acres of Denver. The nearby Auraria campus is also planning to redevelop.

“It's always better to do it right the first time than to have to go back in and change,” Katz says, citing Federal Boulevard as an example of a street that would have benefited from initially being designed with sidewalks, dedicated space for buses, and attention to trees and other greenery along the road. Now the city must work retroactively to implement those improvements to make the street safer.

LaMie says the short-term goals were determined using both data and public input to prioritize projects that would provide the greatest benefit in the parts of the city that need it most. “We want to make sure that, with the limited transportation dollars that we have available to us in the short term, we are advancing those projects,” he says.

There are 6,000 projects the city wants to accomplish, so it used other transportation plans and neighborhood plans to help prioritize. One of the goals of Denver Moves Everywhere is to get all the city’s plans that involve how people move throughout the city, like Denver Moves Transit and the Game Plan for a Healthy City, under one umbrella.

“Sometimes we wait to build transit until we see a transformation in an area, and usually if that happens, we miss out on some of the benefits because people who move to a new area who don't have the transit option will start traveling via car or some other means," he says. "And then, when you bring transit later, their behavior is already pre-set. We think there's a big gap here, and that we should be filling that gap now, hopefully ahead of the transformation.”

For example, there aren’t many transit options on Speer Boulevard, nor is there an easy way to connect East and West Colfax.

Katz says there’s plenty to like about the plan, but it would be a missed opportunity not to move quickly to connect BRT lines to each other. Toftness, who also says there’s lots of good in the plan, adds that he always wants to see more funding for multi-modal projects.

“If our goal truly is to allow people to choose different ways to move around, we really have to put our budget behind that,” he says.

LaMie says that when the plan is finalized — which will likely happen sometime in the spring, once the city has time to account for public comments — people will notice an impact quickly. The plan will be included in the 2024 budget process, and the planning and design process for projects will begin so that those projects will be prepared for construction as soon as funding is available.

“I’ve been in enough community meetings, where a small number show up and can be kind of vocal and loud and cranky,” Toftness says. “And because they're the only ones that show up, they get listened to. So I know it can kind of seem like your voice isn't being heard, but the more input that you can give, the better. It does get seen. Unless you want that small, loud, cranky majority to be the decision-makers, you really don't have a choice but to give your input.”