What Zuni St. Could Be

As The Bike Streets Club builds strength in numbers on Denver streets, we hope it will be easier for the City to build more high-comfort bike infrastructure and get lots of folks to use it as soon as it’s built.

This will help negate one of the main arguments people make against investing in bike infrastructure: that nobody uses it.

In southwest Denver, there’s not much high-comfort bike infrastructure, which the City defines as trails, protected bike lanes, and neighborhood bikeways. Unprotected bike lanes and “buffered” bike lanes are not considered high-comfort.

S. Zuni St., which is an official bike route, is an unprotected, buffered bike lane on a high-speed, mid-size street with long, fast straightaways. Drivers often ignore the posted 30 MPH speed limit.

Zuni is not on the Bike Streets Map because, as low-comfort infrastructure, it’s not a place where people of all ages, abilities, and backgrounds feel comfortable riding.

Instead, the Bike Streets Map uses a winding route that runs parallel to Zuni. It’s scenic, quiet, and pleasant, but not as efficient as Zuni.

Our goal is to get hundreds of people to use the Bike Streets route every day.

Then, we can take this data to the City and show that lots of people are demanding more investment in bike infrastructure that, collectively, can save them hours of commute time everyday.

When the City does the right thing and turns Zuni into a high-quality protected bike lane, we can change the route in the Bike Streets App, direct folks onto Zuni on Day 1, and light up that corridor with bicyclists. This is the dynamic that we hope will happen all over Denver.

Create a critical mass on the streets as they currently exist, support our policy advocate friends in their pitch to the City, and then activate new high-comfort corridors as soon as they come online.