Eighty-four people died on Denver’s streets last year.
By Nathaniel Minor, Denverite
It’s no secret that Denver’s six-year-old pledge to eliminate traffic deaths and serious injuries by 2030 has not gone to plan.
Both deaths and serious injuries have risen significantly since the campaign was launched in 2017. Eighty-four people died on Denver’s streets last year, city data show, and there were 386 crashes that resulted in serious injuries.
Now though, outgoing Mayor Michael Hancock is recommitting to its “Vision Zero” program that reframes serious and fatal crashes as systemic problems that need infrastructure or engineering fixes. His administration on Wednesday released an updated plan that he hopes will get the city back on track.
“We cannot rest,” Hancock wrote in a letter introducing the new plan. “A single life lost on our streets is unacceptable and preventable. We need to make Denver’s streets safe for everyone — no matter where they live in the city, no matter their means, and no matter their choice to walk, bike, drive or take public transit.”
The plan touts the city’s accomplishments since the initial plan was released — including new bike lanes, traffic signal adjustments that give pedestrians more time to cross streets, lower speed limits (including on busy roads like Santa Fe Drive and short sections of other arterial streets), and quick-and-dirty “paint-and-post” traffic-calming measures.
The document also recaps known challenges that Denver, and many other U.S. cities, are facing, like consumers’ increasing preference for dangerous-to-pedestrian SUVs and a rise in speeding during the pandemic.
And it sets a course for the next six years of Vision Zero work that, if the next mayor chooses to follow it, could result in a transformation of the city’s most dangerous streets.