The number of people on the 16th Street Mall on a run-of-the-mill Sunday increased nearly 27 percent this summer, but most visitors still weren’t sticking around to hang out.
Baseline pedestrian counts for Sundays — typically the sleepiest day of the week for the 1¼-mile corridor — jumped to 1,795 people this summer, up from 1,419 people a year earlier, Denver Community Planning and Development executive director Brad Buchanan said during a presentation Thursday at a Downtown Denver Partnership forum.
The average number of people “lingering” and not just moving through, however, stayed flat at 49 for Sundays when there were no , he said.
“It’s like standing in a moving stream,” Buchanan said. “The lack of increase tells us that we need to create better ways, other ways, new ways of creating invitations for people to be there, and we know we need more pedestrian space.”
City and downtown officials have been studying the 16th Street Mall and ways to since 2014, bringing in San Francisco-based consultant Gehl Studio as part of a $650,000 initiative to improve the mall experience.
Final recommendations are expected to be released early next year, Buchanan said.
One thing that seemed increasingly clear from comments at Thursday’s forum, though, is that the Regional Transportation District’s
“When you take the shuttle off the mall and put it somewhere else, it’s a huge inconvenience to those 45,000 people who are riding it on a weekday,” RTD general manager Dave Genova said.
Both ridership and shuttle turnaround time are negatively impacted when the shuttles are rerouted onto 15th and 17th streets, he said. The Mall Ride is RTD’s most-used service.
“We’ve looked at a lot of different options and a lot of different alternatives and we really feel we’re narrowing down on some really good, feasible solutions that will not only maintain the efficiency of the mall shuttle, but create those spaces along the mall,” Genova said.
Building to building along 16th street, the right-of-way is about 80-feet, Genova said. “That’s a lot of space in there. If you were to put the shuttles right in the middle of the mall, that leaves about 28 feet of sidewalk on either side for activation and for pedestrians. We feel that’s an alternative that could really meet the lion’s share of stakeholder issues and needs.”
Taking the shuttles off the mall could actually create more harm than good, Buchanan said.
“If we have no activation on the mall going on, whether it’s intentional or whether it’s organic, and the shuttles are not there, it’s dead,” Buchanan said.
“It’s about the dimension. It’s about the cross section of the mall,” he said. “It is not, we don’t think, about taking the shuttles off the mall. That is not the answer.”
