Denver, The 15-Minute City

Since 2018, we’ve been leading chill group bike rides like Surprise Adventure using the Low-Stress Denver Bike Map.

At the start of each ride, we point out that if you put a pin in a map anywhere in Denver and draw a circle with a 2-3 mile radius around that point, it’s astonishing how much of the city you can cover with a short bike ride.

This is inspired by the idea of the 15-minute city.

This week, we published a new map that shows how Denver is a 15-minute city when you ride with the Low-Stress Denver Bike Map and the Bike Streets App.

Enter any Denver address and you’ll quickly see a set of blue hexagons which show how much of the city you can reach on a bike in just 15 minutes.

Press any hexagon and you’ll see a low-stress bike route between your starting point and that hexagon. (Future versions of the map will hopefully include counts of all the grocery stores, restaurants, coffee shops, parks, libraries, etc., that you can ride to in less than 15 minutes.)

These aren’t routes on big, scary streets. You’ll be riding on trails, protected bike lanes, and quiet neighborhood streets like this:

Share the map with your bike-curious friends and tell them that pretty much everything they need, no matter where they live, is within a 15-minute bike ride.