Opinion: The Mean Streets of Denver
What Traffic Laws? With Little To No Enforcement, Our Streets Are Lord Of The Flies On Wheels
By Gary Martyn
For the GPHN
Nearly everyone has a story about crazy driving in Denver. Maybe something you witnessed, maybe worse.
We had one of our dearest friends get hit by a man who ran both red lights at Monaco and Colfax. He knocked her car halfway to Locust, totaled it, broke bones in her neck, and did it without a driver’s license or insurance, and in a borrowed truck.
Those of you who frequently travel Colfax are treated to all manner of crazy stuff. A motorcycle group traveling en masse, some doing wheelies, riding on the sidewalk, blocking intersections. The little drag races, the cutting in and out, and on and on. Bits of cars that are in the street and on the curbing some mornings. The signs that have been run over. In July, there were two, some say three, rollover accidents on the narrow section of Quebec between Montview and Colfax.
Stoplights and stop signs some days feel like they are just suggestions. The situation is like Lord of the Flies on wheels.
Denver has been trying to combat this with Vision Zero, originally a Swedish program that has been replicated by many U.S. municipalities to combat traffic mayhem. Denver’s goal is to eliminate all traffic deaths and serious bodily injuries by improving road safety by — get this — 2030.
Denver started with Vision Zero in 2017. That year, there were 51 traffic fatalities and 292 serious bodily injuries. Those numbers have steadily risen — and significantly so — ever since.
Last year 83 people died on Denver streets, and a record 425 people suffered serious bodily injuries.
This year, as of Oct. 26 there have been 60 traffic deaths in Denver.
The problem is that Denver government itself is a major cause of the problem.
Sometime during or right after the pandemic, city officials made a conscious decision to stop enforcing traffic laws. I realize that the pandemic brought pressures of short staffing, and there have been problems with police stops, but just letting us fight it out amongst ourselves doesn’t seem to be working well.
There apparently wasn’t a plan B.
It seems many metro areas are having the same problem. Reading about causes to roadway woes all over has been interesting. Some blame city planners for streets that are too wide. Some blame traffic engineers for too-high speeds. Some blame fire departments for responding to calls that aren’t fires in their big trucks and being inflexible on road design. Some say cars are too big, and trucks are even bigger.
It is a challenge to modernize city streets that were designed in a much different era for a different set of circumstances. At the end of the day, however, people are driving fast and recklessly without any checks on their behavior.
We are so used to driving as fast as we want that it is now normal. I was surprised one recent day when driving east on Montview just east of Krameria. A woman driving a minivan full of kids passed me. I checked my speed. I was a bit over the limit, so she was quite a bit over.
The town of Morrison, just west of us, installed a speed camera to issue tickets. In May, they issued around 10,000 of them in just two weeks, and the camera only snaps the vehicles going 10 miles per hour over. I don’t think we are slowing down anytime soon.
Denver’s Vision Zero offers ideas to help combat traffic mayhem. You can read it on the city’s website, at this link: tinyurl.com/DenverVisionZero.
It’s about 70 pages of government speak, but it has these handy tips:
• Public transit is the safest way to travel the city, it says. (Tell that to someone who must ride the Colfax or Federal bus).
• Identify problematic areas and take actions to reduce speed and volume. (That’s where all the bendy posts, bollards, squiggly lines and faux roundabouts come from.)
• Reduce speed limits in high-equity areas. (Denver reduced the residential street speed limit to 20 miles per hour citywide unless otherwise posted. Trouble is, no one pays attention. The speed limit on 23rd Avenue just went down to 25 miles per hour. Trouble is, no one pays attention. Do you see a trend?)
Vision Zero does make a couple of references to enforcement. They are mentioned in passing, kind of like a last resort. No one wants to get a ticket, and the police seem happy not to have to give them out. That leaves us with precious few ways of returning the streets to a safer situation.
I certainly don’t have an answer to this. I do know the city has really let us all down. We pay a lot for public safety, and we have been left high and dry. Leaders with vision would have recognized the perils of abandoning traffic enforcement and would have had a backup plan.
Our city administrators give us bendy posts and bollards — and apparently just hope they work.
Gary Martyn is a Park Hill native.