Denver Plans Colorado Boulevard Speed Fixes as Safety Advocate Presses for Faster Action
City transportation officials are rolling out speed-reduction measures and protected left turns on Colorado Boulevard by year's end, while a resident whose father was killed by a driver says the timeline is too slow.
By Arjun Patel ·
Denver's transportation department is preparing a series of changes to Colorado Boulevard, even as some residents question whether the city is on track to meet its goal of ending traffic deaths and serious injuries by 2030. The city's Vision Zero initiative began roughly a decade ago.
The doubts follow a grim year. Denver recorded 94 traffic deaths in 2025, the highest total in at least 13 years.
Among those pressing for change is Alan Lally, whose father was struck by a car and killed while crossing a street in Michigan five years ago this month. Lally moved to Denver soon afterward and has since founded Project 311, an effort that tracks how quickly the city responds to 311 requests and monitors traffic safety. He said his personal history drives the work, and that he shared his father's story during public comment at a City Council meeting in August to put a human face on the problem.
Lally points to Colorado Boulevard as a trouble spot and describes the intersection at Colorado and Mississippi Avenue as "absolute chaos." Data from the Department of Transportation and Infrastructure (DOTI) show 67 crashes at that intersection from 2020 through 2024. On the stretch between Mississippi and Iliff avenues, Colorado averaged 127 crashes a year.
DOTI is applying measures from its SPEED program to South Colorado between 1st Avenue and Hampden Avenue. The city reported fewer fatal and late-night crashes over the past three years on Federal Boulevard and Alameda Avenue after using the approach there. On Colorado, the work includes more speed limit signs, additional electronic speed feedback signs, signal programming meant to slow traffic to the posted limit, and shorter traffic light cycles overnight so signals spend less time resting on green.
At intersections such as Colorado and Mississippi, the department will also move to protected left turns only, replacing flashing yellow arrows with a solid green arrow. Lally has long urged that change to protect pedestrians, but he objects to DOTI's goal of finishing it, along with the other improvements, by the end of the year. He noted that DOTI recommended the green arrow switch in an audit last summer. "Every day we wait to make this change is risking another accident, maybe even a death," he said.
Asked by Denver7 why the change was not made sooner, DOTI Communications Director Nancy Kuhn said the work must be handled across the whole corridor. Signals are synchronized and sequenced, she said, so changing a single intersection could create problems elsewhere. "We're all over the city right now, doing the things that, from an engineering perspective, we think that we can do to make a difference," Kuhn said.
Kuhn called zero traffic deaths an "aspirational goal" but "the only goal to have," adding that it is not acceptable to treat a small number of fatalities as tolerable.
The city also plans to introduce speed enforcement cameras for the first time, on busy streets like Colorado, beginning next year. DOTI has not yet chosen a vendor but expects the cameras to be installed in the first quarter of 2027.
Kuhn said engineering and enforcement have limits when it comes to human behavior. Denver, she said, needs to build a culture of safety so that drivers understand the damage they can do if they are not careful.
Source: Denver7 (KMGH)
