Denver, CO

Level: gold
Population: 600,158
Population Density: 3,923/sq. mi.
Contact: Emily Snyder
720.913.4562
Emily.snyder@denvergov.org

Community Highlights

Denver is designated as a Gold-level community due to its planning efforts, education and encouragement programs, innovative engineering practices, and commitment to meaningful citizen engagement. Highlights of Denver’s application include:

  • Interconnected planning efforts that focus on increasing safety and improving mobility for pedestrians. Denver has made great progress implementing its Pedestrian Master Plan, while pedestrian issues are well-integrated into the city’s Strategic Transportation Plan and the Denver Moves Plan.
  • An outstanding commitment to improving accessibility throughout the city. Denver has a full-time ADA Coordinator and funds a program for citizens to request audible pedestrian signals. Seventy percent of Denver’s intersections have curb ramps on all four corners and the city constructs over 1,000 curb ramps each year.
  • Denver uses a variety of public participation techniques to inform vision and goals, confirm ideas, and identify and prioritize individual project recommendations. The city works with community advocates conducting neighborhood outreach and tailors the input process to the specific area or level of project. Staff has also participated in cultural training for doing outreach in low-income and limited English-speaking neighborhoods.
  • Denver has an excellent parking management strategy that is outlined in the Strategic Parking Plan and implemented through the city’s new form-based zoning code. There are no parking minimums in Denver’s Central Business District and parking ratios are based on activity patterns.
  • Planning and engineering staff attend professional development webinars and trainings through the Association of Bicycle and Pedestrian Professionals (APBP) and the Institute for Transportation Engineers (ITE). City officials and staff members also participate in peer-to-peer sharing through the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO).
  • As Denver works to promote multimodal transportation, the city is pairing the effort with a safety campaign called “Heads Up.” To get the message out, the city has partnered with advocacy groups, schools, and the Regional Transportation District.
  • The Denver Police Department has a Neighborhood Enforcement Team (NET) that works closely with city traffic engineers to help mitigate traffic-related issues. Denver Public Works and NET work collaboratively to reduce or eliminate traffic problems targeted in specific neighborhoods regularly perform site surveys