The Transportation Committee of the Denver City Council met on March 13, 2026, at 7:45 PM to discuss the city's Vision Zero program, Safe Routes to School initiatives, and traffic safety concerns. DOTI staff presented data on fatal and serious injury crashes, speed management, and infrastructure projects. Council members raised questions about specific corridors, crosswalks, speed cameras, and the need for improved communication between departments.
Yeah, I just see some incongruency there. Um I do worry. I did the celebrity cross guard at Valverde two years ago, and a lot of the people are walking and finding their way across, but um it is still very scary for them, and so I don't know how that them doing that makes them safer, um, I guess is where I'm confused, and so uh it seems like there's a more need for infrastructure than necessarily mode shift that and I don't know what the strategy is to get the mode shift. There's also ways that you can think about encouraging and educating and thinking about um alternative modes of training. So carpool is always an option. Um I like to think about the concept of park a grade away. So as child, you know, if you must drive to school, um, you can park one block away for your first grade or two blocks away for your second, and so on and so forth. That'll be your kind of um decoupling some of the um challenges that occur when you know you have a hundred families all trying to access one parcel of land um at a 15 minute window, both in the morning and the afternoon. Um, there are ways that you can kind of disperse some of that tension that we can think about that don't always necessarily mean that uh you have to travel across to you know major roadway or high injury network roadway or core far co-core focus of the SIF routes to schools program is infrastructure safety so that you can facilitate people walking and biking as well as driving to the schools, so it's safe movement management and much of what which much of what John was talking about were those improvements on how we do that lights, sidewalks, crossings, etc. And um, and then education. Okay, that's helpful to know. Um if speed seems to be such a problem, why are we not aggressively lowering speeds on the high injury corridors? So we've got a combination of things, and we're all feel free to to to add into this. So uh we are in in many, so as you know, citywide we've lowered speed limits uh to 20 on all neighborhood streets, other than those what we call collectors or arterials. Those collectors and arterials we also collaborate with in many cases, as you're aware, they are also state highways, and so we collaborate with our partners at CDOT and others, you know, and how we can make requests to think about how we lower down speed limits. You have speed limits in a space that is about safe speeds and the travel of safe speeds. As you know, we do speed studies on what is the average speed in those corridors and then how you appropriately set the speeds there, and then how you monitor and let people know when they are speeding, which is why you have reflective speed signs and others. And so uh those are things that we are exploring, and uh, I don't know if we have instances of HI high injury networks where we actually uh Alameda is an upcoming example where we will be lowering the speed limit along Alameda in our favorite area where we've been talking about for the last you know few months. Um so that speed will be coming down in that particular corridor. And um and actually uh you probably could list some others where we've been doing it. We have a few others that we can provide you that list, and particularly we're very much interested in those excessive speeders doing 10 or more mile an hour over the posted speed limit and bringing those down. Um but yeah, we can get you a uh a list of I might add just real quickly on this question of automated speed cameras, which is always this delicate balance of how we think about it and the impacts of community and where we go and what it is in a crash reduction factor. And it as you know the state carefully crafted legislation to allow it. Um it is for excessive speeders, so it's basically 11 and over for those excessive speeders. Um you have these proven crash reduction factors when it comes to speed, and there's a pretty significant factor of you know upwards of 45 to 50 percent. You see some dramatic impact in cities and others. We've been following San Francisco's recently as they've been just implementing theirs. You're seeing speed reductions in these corridors by upwards of 70 percent. I mean, it's been very high. Why do we care about speed? I mean, you use the example of let's say a federal, and just happened we had a young man who was crossing on a uh on a scooter and crossed federal and was hit and killed. Um similarly when uh with 38th and Tejon, um, speed was a factor potentially in both of those, and let's say that there is a mistake that is made and how people are traveling as we're as they go. The speed does not allow you the chance to respond to a mistake. And that that is why we care so much about speed, because it reduces the human factor for us to be able to respond to adapt to something that maybe is happening in the corridor that that we could otherwise prevent. And that's why we care. That's why we care as much as we do about speed, and um and that's why one of the reasons that we'll be focusing again on these automated speed cameras too, and we are seeing we just nationally and otherwise, we are seeing the effect of those and what it does to have people start caring about how they drive in the behavior and about how it cares for the people around. I appreciate that. Um my last question, and then I'll um hand it over to committee chair, is just I know you talked about researching fatal crashes. I've asked for the reports on the fatal crashes in my district. I've never gotten them or gotten briefed on them. Is there a report at the end of this investigation? And are there changes made? And I think including us in that conversation would be very helpful. Absolutely. We could do that, and we can provide that report. Um we can we can provide that report in that summary report. We'll do that. Just just awareness, it takes some time sometimes uh for us as we go through that process. We absolutely can do that. Yeah, I like how long because I've been asking for reports for years, and I don't know if they're not done yet.