Denver is forging ahead with more than 500 traffic-calming projects that reach into almost every corner of the city — a makeover costing nearly $1 billion meant to improve safety, walkability, and public transit.
It’s one of the most ambitious efforts in U.S. cities to reduce space for vehicle traffic and replace it with wider sidewalks, bike lanes and dedicated bus lanes. Proponents cast the makeover as the best solution to multiple problems as traffic deaths increase and developers build high-density housing.
City transportation officials began the work a decade ago with pilot projects. They made traffic calming an official policy around 2020 and, three years later, adopted a plan. Scores of projects have been done, and the $280 million reconstruction of East Colfax Avenue with Bus Rapid Transit is scheduled for completion next year. The bulk of the projects are still in planning and design but should mostly be done by 2032.
While proponents say changes have made streets safer, critics suspect projects that reduce space for cars will only make traffic congestion worse — even after the construction disruptions end.
“They don’t want you to drive,” optician Rachelle Fresquez said as she ate lunch in the cool tranquility of her car, idling a block off West 29th Avenue, where 13 speed bumps, and white plastic posts and green-painted bicycle lanes have slowed a once-speedy route. She’s lived in Denver all her life and commutes across it to work. “It’s a mess.”
The road work creates conditions where “drivers are sitting longer in traffic, which is worse for emissions. And as you put more bicycles and pedestrians on the same roads with cars, more accidents are happening,” said Colorado Automobile Dealers Association president Matthew Groves.
Asked about the criticism, Denver Mayor Mike Johnston acknowledged the difficulty of transforming a city long oriented around cars.
“When you try to make some streets narrower, it will make traffic slower on that street,” Johnston said. “It stands to reason you can put fewer cars through a two-lane street than you can through a four-lane street.”
Among other , Seattle and San Francisco have also invested heavily in transit, pedestrian, and bike infrastructure. From New York to Los Angeles, are reengineering roads to create streets designed for more than cars. Denver officials studied efforts in San Francisco before launching pilot projects here a decade ago and, in 2020, under Mayor Michael Hancock, adopted as policy.
“The hope is you get some behavioral changes, that you will get some folks choosing to take a bus,” Johnston said.“We want to make it a city where you don’t have to rely on a car.”
Fewer car lanes, wider sidewalks, faster buses
The projects that the Denver Department of Transportation and Infrastructure, or DOTI, is planning include overhauls of The plans show vehicle lane reductions, sidewalk widening, and signal adjustments to give buses priority on West 38th Avenue, West Mississippi Avenue, Evans Avenue, and Speer Boulevard.
Larger-scale projects like the East Colfax work will install bus-only lanes and high-frequency Bus Rapid Transit along Federal and Colorado boulevards. Hundreds more smaller projects in neighborhoods across the city would alter vehicle routes.
The funding for the overall effort comes from DOTI’s $890 million annual budget, with support from the Colorado Department of Transportation and federal grants, and voter-approved $441 million in bond debt.
Fighting congestion
Denver leaders’ rationale is that without major change, , already increasing faster than in other cities, will get worse. The fear among critics is the same — that remodeling roads will worsen congestion.
“So what’s the right solution?” asked Jill Locantore, director of the Denver Streets Partnership, one of several advocacy groups pressing city leaders to carry out planned projects quickly.
“Overwhelming inertia” has prevented Denver from moving people more efficiently, Locantore said. “The status quo is our biggest problem. …. When street space is rebalanced, many people will choose other ways of getting around, travel at different times of day, combine multiple trips into one, or simply take fewer discretionary trips.”
But in areas such as Washington Park, the density of schools, shops, and high-rise apartments guarantees heavy vehicle traffic, and reducing lanes is a recipe for “traffic jams, more than we already have,” said Christophe Goudy, co-owner of along Alameda, who commutes for up to an hour from his home near Parker.
“Making it safer? That’s another thing. Before we opened, we had a car crash through the window. Shrinking the road isn’t going to make it safer. If we had a police car parked there by the school, that would decrease the speed.”
While Denver business owners generally like the idea of increased options for moving around the city using bicycles and buses, any road changes must preserve the ability of residents — including “a vast amount of our customers” — to drive their vehicles and park, said J.J. Ament, president of the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce.
“We need the city to focus on the mobility choices that people will actually use, not just what they say they want. In too many cases, DOTI has made changes proposed by a small minority of vocal interest groups that don’t represent the bulk of how people use our transit system,” Ament said.
“We need to align urban planning with human experience.”
But narrowing Santa Fe Drive from three lanes to two through a popular arts district south of downtown proved “absolutely transformative” and “we can’t wait” for sidewalk widening and protected bike lanes, said Nolan Hahn, president of the La Alma Lincoln Park Neighborhood Association, who rides e-bikes instead of driving. “The way we’ve built our cities — until now — is coercive.”
Denver streamlined
Denver residents from the 1890s to the 1920s relied on an extensive . Since the 1940s, Denver leaders have built and maintained roads to facilitate car-first mobility, according to the plan that city officials commissioned and adopted as a blueprint for change.
The city spans 100 square miles (excluding the 53-square-mile Denver International Airport), and 22 square miles of the area are road lanes, compared with 12 square miles of parking, five square miles of sidewalks, one square mile of bicycle-only lanes, and less than one square mile of bus-only lanes, the plan says.
The makeover eventually will give buses priority along 600 miles of lanes overall — 10 times the transit-priority miles today, city spokeswoman Nancy Kuhn said.
DOTI officials decide timetables, targeting high-accident areas and historically neglected neighborhoods, according to the plan. A 2024 DOTI based on the extent to which they promote walking, biking and using buses and trains — and limits projects to expand capacity for cars.
When Denver reduced vehicle lanes and installed bus-only lanes in 2017 along Broadway and Lincoln Street south of downtown, the average travel time on RTD buses between downtown and Englewood decreased by three minutes, said Jaime Lewis, a former RTD director who also has served on Denver’s transportation advisory board. City officials didn’t say what the impact has been on travel times for people driving cars.
But Groves, the Colorado Automobile Dealers Association president, estimated his work commute from south Denver up Broadway has increased by six minutes.
“Why are we spending all this money? Drivers on Broadway cut through side streets where people live, and they’re frustrated, so they’re going too fast,” Groves said. He had heard “great promises” from city officials about liberating new options for moving around and seen the passionate advocacy by young urban activists. “They are choking off our streets.”
The overall amount of driving in metro Denver has reached a record-high level, exceeding 85 million miles a day, according to transportation analysts at the Denver Regional Council of Governments. They project a 43% increase in by 2050. However, DRCOG’s noted that the amount of driving per person – about 25.7 miles a day in 2019 – has decreased to 24.8 miles a day.
Meanwhile, Denver traffic fatalities hit a record high of 93 in 2025, up 16% over the 80 in 2024, and nearly double the 49 in 2017, police data shows. The deaths in 2025 included 35 pedestrians.
DOTI director Amy Ford said investments in the road projects are already showing results, such as increased bicycle ridership in areas where protected bike lanes were installed.
“Our goal is to reduce single-occupant vehicle trips, to encourage transportation mode shifts, and to ensure that people still can move around our city,” she said.
The alternative of increasing road capacity won’t work because housing and commercial development along roads prevents widening, Ford added. “There is simply no more room. It would be cost-prohibitive to do that.”
Friction
As projects advance into public input meetings, residents and business owners often object, challenging final plans. City officials didn’t cite any project where opposition forced cancellation. However, a six-month tussle over a proposed lane drew in scores of neighborhood activists, leading to a compromise to be tested this year as a pilot project.
“Everybody got their knickers in a twist,” longtime resident Biddie Labrot said, walking her dog recently just north of Alameda. She’s skeptical that the compromise switching from a full lane reduction to a partial lane reduction with “turn pockets” will improve conditions because “when you change the pattern, you cause problems,” Labrot said. “We’re going to have a lot of head-ons.” When traffic on Alameda and Downing gets too crazy, cutting onto slower side streets “is your option,” she said. “I started doing that because it was prettier and my blood pressure didn’t go up.”
Sharing roads with new users creates challenges.
“It makes me uncomfortable,” Laurie Heiken said after navigating the curves and protected bicycling lanes along East Yale Avenue. “Bike riders should stay on the bike paths we have.”
Behind the counter in Taqueria Mi Pueblo at the corner of Federal and West 29th, co-owner Jesus Tarin noted that, before a bike lane was installed, “we had parking on the street. It was good for our customers,” he said. “I don’t like the bicyclists riding on the street.”
The friction reflects a hard truth that metro Denver residents widely prefer driving to moving around by walking, bicycling or riding buses and trains, said economist Randal O’Toole, director of the at the Independence Institute, a libertarian think tank in Denver.
“Cars get you from where you are to where you want to go in the shortest time possible, and it is actually pretty cheap. Transit does not get you from where you are to where you want to go,” O’Toole said.
Just as two decades of densification by building apartments has failed to make Denver housing more affordable (O’Toole argues that replacing single-family homes reduced the supply of housing people prefer), shrinking vehicle traffic space to promote bicycling and transit also will fail, O’Toole said. “It just doesn’t work. It is happening nationwide. It hasn’t worked anywhere else. It is not going to work in Denver.”
Traffic calming in and has proved popular in neighborhoods. San Francisco officials have been struggling to work through backlogs of proposals to install more speed bumps, raised crosswalks, and concrete islands to improve safety. However, the overall impact on citywide vehicle traffic congestion remains a challenge. Both San Francisco and Seattle struggle with severe congestion that ranks among the worst in the nation.
Johnston said balance will be the key to success in Denver, maintaining smooth flows for the cars “in our blood” while giving new options so that people in Denver “can have a great time and make great time.”
When conflicts arise, “both sides have strong convictions,” and tradeoffs must be made. “No one stakeholder can get everything they want,” Johnston said.
The road remodeling will be done in a way that lets residents choose whether to switch from cars to buses — “not because they feel they are forced to do it,” he said.
“Every incremental trip people don’t have to use the car for does reduce traffic congestion,” Johnston said. “We are trying to build transit hubs around the city that will have density. … We want to have a street system that supports them.”
Drivers look ahead
In west Denver, Alejandra Castañeda said she strongly supports traffic-calming and wishes she could rely more on buses to avoid the hassles of driving. Work demands and moving around with her daughter forced her to purchase, reluctantly, a used orange electric Fiat, she said. Reducing road space for cars “isn’t about slowing us down, inconveniencing us. It’s about encouraging safe speeds. Too many people have been killed. We just need the city to help drivers, including me, do the safe thing.”
While Stacey Walker’s roommate hates the West 29th Avenue speed bumps and diverts to 26th, Walker accepts the reconstructed route as “a good reminder,” he said. “You can’t blow through here at 45 miles per hour anymore.”
American Automobile Association lobbyist Skyler McKinley still hails the car as “the single greatest invention for economic mobility of all time.” He relies on driving to manage a tavern he purchased 156 miles from Denver. “The car is a foundational technology in American life and will remain so,” McKinley said recently, standing on the corner of 14th Avenue and Franklin Street, on his way to the state Capitol.
He observed that nearly every vehicle whizzing past him carried one person.
“We know that adding lanes for vehicles won’t reduce traffic congestion because of induced demand (the concept that expanding urban road capacity encourages more driving). The question is whether removing space for cars increases traffic and congestion. In the near term? Yes, no question about it. But other modes of transportation may move more people more efficiently,” McKinley said.
“By removing lanes, you increase options. If the goal of the transportation system is to move people, is the car the most efficient tool within a city? The jury is out on whether Denver’s choice will be the right choice in the long run. We won’t know until they do it.”
