Hey Denver, it's time for this biweekly meeting of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee of Denver City Council.

Join us for the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee starting now.

All right, good afternoon.

And welcome to the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

My name is Chantal M.

Lewis.

I'm the council person for District 8.

And today is July 1st, the start of a new era, and I am excited with that.

We can go to introductions and we can start online.

I understand we have an avatar online, so go ahead.

And then we can start in the room.

I'll start with you, Councilor Nines.

All cash from South Denver District 6.

Rodal Vidres lucky district seven.

Lovely.

Thank you.

So we have only one briefing this afternoon, and I'm actually going to allow Councilwoman Alvides open this up and intro this because this was a request of hers.

So take it.

Awesome.

Great.

Well, I'd like to invite Avi Sapper up with Vamos Bike Lanes.

I think this is a very exciting day to have you come present to the council about some of the work that has been done around thinking differently around bikes.

I think we all hear a lot around how people get around the city on bikes and who prefers what.

And this is an individual who has done a lot of work creating uh actual network around our city that connects you and outside of our city, and I think um has had some interesting conversations with Dottie.

So looking forward to hearing more about your work and where you're at today.

Thank you.

With that, you can introduce.

Thank you, Councilwoman.

Thank you all for having me.

We're gonna talk today about taking the next step with Vamos, and we'll get into that in just a sec.

First, I want to introduce myself.

I'm Avi Stopper.

I've lived in Denver for 14 years now, and for most of my adult life, I've been an entrepreneur in the for-profit world.

I founded and built a tech company between 2007 and 2018.

It was a Denver-based company.

There were 75 people, and we sold, and I left that in 2018, and I turned my attention to social entrepreneurship to try to figure out ways in which we can make our cities, our institutions stronger and better.

I've worked on initiatives involving uh voting access during the uh during the pandemic election.

Rewilding Denver is a personal passion of mine.

But the most substantive work that I've done is with an organization that I founded called Bike Streets, and I've been working on that since 2018.

That has been the core of my work from day to day.

I spend almost all of my time thinking about how Denver can have a complete network that anyone can use to get to any destination in our city.

At the core of the bike streets initiative is what we call the low-stress Denver bike map, and this is a crowdsourced effort that we have been working on since 2018.

It is a bike map at its essence of more than 400 miles of existing trails and infrastructures you might imagine, like protected bike lanes, but also chill, quiet residential streets that exist all across the city and are the types of places that people like to ride their bikes with their families already today.

So we have taken as much input as we can from all over the city and published this map, distributed it, and tried to make it available for as many folks as possible.

We lead group bike rides on this.

And what's amazing, and this is a really important thing to know about Denver, is that there is a complete bike network for people of all ages and abilities that is hiding in plain sight.

And so what we're here to talk about with Vamos is how Denver can have a formal bike network and be really the first in the country to have a complete connected bike network that anyone can use to get to any destination in our city.

We publish this map now, primarily less the old school way on paper maps, but with uh um uh iPhone and Android mobile applications that are free for anyone to use to navigate to any location in the city.

And we have made this technology platform free for advocacy groups around the country.

So we are currently working on these low-stress bike maps in communities from coast to coast.

More than 30 cities have these maps in one state or another, really trying to make it possible for people to navigate their communities as they exist today.

What we're gonna talk about today is Vamos.

And Vamos is basically an extrapolation of the low-stress bike network in terms of we're looking at how a city can take this plane, this bike network that is hiding in plain sight and codify it and formalize it so that we have for the first time ever a real complete bike network that anyone can use to get to any destination.

And we're talking about how we can do that for what is a fraction of the conventional cost, time, and conflict that plagues these types of projects.

We think that the first version of Vamos, version 1.0, can be built for $5 million, $5 million for a complete bike network in three years or less.

If this sounds familiar, many of you have heard about it before.

We talked about it during the last campaign, and I'm thankful to all of those members who lent their support to the Vamos Initiative.

The mayor made it part of his platform, his campaign platform as well.

And what I will say is that at this particular moment, we are getting a very encouraging response from the mayor's office thinking about how we can make healthy, low-cost, active transportation possible for anyone in this city today.

We are really making good progress with this, which is why I thought it was an opportune moment to come and have a chat with you.