DENVER — Denver has an ambitious goal: eliminate traffic deaths and serious injuries by 2030. The city’s ‘Vision Zero’ initiative launched about a decade ago.
Some Denverites are raising questions about how much progress is being made after 94 traffic deaths in 2025, the most in at least 13 years.
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One of those pushing for safer streets in the city is Alan Lally, whose father was hit by a car and killed crossing a street in Michigan five years ago this month.
Lally soon after moved to Denver, and now has started Project 311, which tracks 311 response times and traffic safety around the city.
“I wouldn't be doing this if it weren't for my personal story,” he told Denver7. “I spoke at City Council public comment back in August, sharing my dad's story, in hopes of putting a human element behind behind a very real problem here in Denver.”
Lally specifically points to Colorado Boulevard as a problematic street and the Colorado-Mississippi Avenue intersection as risky, calling it “absolute chaos.”
According to data from Denver’s Department of Transportation and Infrastructure (DOTI), that intersection has had 67 crashes between 2020 and 2024. And between Mississippi Avenue and Iliff Avenue, Colorado saw 127 crashes a year, on average.
DOTI is making changes on Colorado to improve safety. The city saw fewer fatal and late night crashes in the last three years on Federal Boulevard and Alameda Avenue after introducing its SPEED program.
The department is now implementing those same changes to reduce speeds on South Colorado between 1st Avenue and Hampden Avenue, including:
- Installing more speed limit signs
- Installing more electronic speed feedback signs
- Programming traffic signals to slow vehicles down to the speed limit
- Shortening traffic light cycle lengths in the overnight hours, reducing the amount of time that signals rest in green
“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,” said Nancy Kuhn, DOTI’s Communications Director.
At intersections like Colorado and Mississippi, DOTI will change the intersection to allow only “protected” left turns, eliminating flashing yellow arrows in favor of a solid green arrow for left turns.
That is a change Lally has been calling for to protect pedestrians. But he’s not happy with DOTI’s end-of-the-year timeline to complete that change and the other safety improvements.
He points out that DOTI recommended the green arrow change in an audit last summer.
“Every day we wait to make this change is risking another accident, maybe even a death,” he said. “And I can tell you from personal experience that one death is too many.”
Denver7 asked DOTI why the department did not make that change sooner.
“You don't just do one intersection,” Kuhn said. “You look at the entire corridor and how people move down it, and they're synchronized and sequenced. So you don't just hit one, and then that might cause an issue somewhere else. So you do it in a coordinated, corridor-wide approach, and that's what we're doing.”
Denver7 also asked if it’s realistic to expect Denver ever getting to zero traffic deaths in a certain timeframe.
“It's an aspirational goal,” Kuhn replied. “It's the only goal to have. It's not okay to say, ‘Well, two fatalities is okay.’ It needs to be zero.”
Starting next year, Kuhn says, the city also plans to add speed enforcement cameras for the first time, on busy streets like Colorado. The city has still yet to hire a vendor, but expects to install the cameras in the first quarter of 2027.
Kuhn adds that engineering and enforcement can only do so much to counter human behavior.
“It's a culture of safety that we need to build in our city, so that people care,” she said. “And when they're behind the wheel, they realize that they can do a lot of damage if they're not careful.”
