It’s been three months since the city of Denver installed its newest vision of a neighborhood bikeway near Little Cheesman Park, and residents are tracking a series of accidents that have followed the improvements, one involving an injury.

Meanwhile, residents in other areas of the city are voicing worries that similar improvements are now headed their way.

Neighbors surrounding the intersection of East 7th Avenue and Williams Street beside the park have tallied six crashes in the few months after the city’s neighborhood bikeway arrived. They range from car or truck collisions at a new roundabout installed as part of the infrastructure a block west of the intersection to a June 29 bike encounter with a bollard that sent a woman to the emergency room with an abdominal injury.

“There have always been confrontations (at this intersection). I have never seen an accident until the bollards went in,” Mike Bateman, whose home faces 7th and Williams, told The Denver Gazette.

Bateman recounted personally witnessing four accidents in recent weeks, including one that happened the previous morning, in which a child fell off a bike after hitting a bollard.

Aware of the complaints, District 5 Councilwoman Amanda Sawyer told The Denver Gazette this week, “We’re very concerned and continue to keep hearing of accidents in this stretch.”

After neighbors began voicing concerns, Sawyer conducted a Zoom meeting on July 20 between the city’s Department of Transportation Infrastructure and dozens of residents troubled by the new infrastructure.

Following that encounter, the department responded in a lengthy Aug. 10 memo to neighbors that cited seven modifications being made at the intersection to address issues, ranging from moving and adding signs, to removing some bollards — DOTI calls them “flexposts” — that may have been involved in the June injury accident.

But a visit this week showed more than 80 bollards still in place around the intersection, arrayed along brightly painted lanes and zones on the intersecting streets. A new “Do Not Enter” sign that diverts westbound traffic on Seventh from continuing beyond Williams Street remained, as well.

Following a query from The Denver Gazette after some reported incidents, Nancy Kuhn, director of DOTI’s communications office, replied that the city had no record of any of the mishaps.

In addition to minor accidents, the tally reported by area residents included a construction vehicle that collided with a power pole, while rounding the radius of the new roundabout at 7th and Gilpin Street, resulting in downed wires according to one account; and, a late-night accident between Gilpin and Williams that was responded to by neighbors, in which a car had hit a bike after the cyclist had jumped off.

Apparently, no police report was made by the cyclist in that case nor following any of the other incidents cited by residents.

Councilwoman Sawyer said she hasn’t been satisfied with DOTI’s responses to her own queries.

“I’m as frustrated as the residents are,” she said.

However, she added that neighbors should notify police following incidents to enable the city to weigh the performance of the installations.

“We need residents to be reporting,” Sawyer said.

Other Denver residents worry the bollards are coming their way 

Meanwhile, other Denver residents who lie in the path of planned, protected bike lanes are worried about how those could affect their own neighborhoods.

“We’ve been contacting Denver Bikes and our city council reps for weeks now with no indication that anyone is rethinking this obviously misguided project before it begins,” said South Denver resident Cary Graham, who lives near a pending project on East Yale Avenue across from McWilliams Park.

Original plans for improvements along Yale called for a buffered bike lane, but now the city’s web site shows that a protected bike lane is being considered for the segment. Unlike a buffered lane that is fashioned from painted lines, protected lanes involve some vertical improvements similar to those along 7th.

Graham and other residents are worried about parking that would be lost adjacent to their park, and whether snowplows and maintenance vehicles would operate in the tight confines those modifications would create. Graham also questioned whether a protected lane is really necessary so close to the East Harvard Gulch Trail, which passes through the park directly beside Yale.

Residents at Little Cheesman complained that the city did little to inform them in advance of the extensive infrastructure installation on 7th, and Graham maintains that the city has been spotty in notifying of a new lane on Yale.

“A buffered lane made from paint I’d be totally fine with,” Graham said, adding he called and spoke with a city engineer, who told him that the original plan for a modest lane was later overruled in favor of the more elaborate lane.

“If I could just get that city engineer to come down and see if this is needed,” Graham said.

Residents of Denver’s Crestmoor Park neighborhood south of Sixth Avenue between Holly Street and Monaco Parkway are also worried about a bikeway planned through a quiet area along Kearney Street that DOTI has targeted for 2025-2026.

‘Going really well’

The city’s Neighborhood Bikeways plan, which includes creating some routes along quieter streets, has been largely supported by cycling organizations — including the Denver Bicycle Lobby. 

“In general, it has been going really well,” said Lobby spokesperson Rob Toftness, who was just back from a tour of Amsterdam, where he rented a bike.

“You can point a bike (there) in any direction and know you’re going to have a safe connection,” he added.

Toftness, who lives downtown, said Denver’s improvements create a more comfortable, protected biking experience compared to what he and other cyclists experienced in years past. He dismissed concerns expressed by neighbors about the Cheesman Park improvements.

“These are people just trying to defeat this whole thing,” he told The Denver Gazette.

Toftness added that safety has been a primary motivator of the city program, in line with its Vision Zero initiative to eliminate traffic deaths.

The city, in its Aug. 10 memo, told residents that the bikeway design through low traffic neighborhoods follows in the path of bike systems installed in Minneapolis, Seattle, Boulder, Fort Collins, and Portland.

But even some cyclists questioned the safety of the bollards and other vertical installations that mark intersections along protected bike lanes.

Cycle activist Bryan Wilson, who blogs extensively about bike lanes, said Denver’s improvements incorporate some structures that he believes shouldn’t be built.

Those include vertical diverters that protect bike traffic in the lane, but that may obstruct cyclists arriving from a side street, creating potential conflicts with car traffic. Wilson also echoed a sentiment expressed by some neighborhood critics of the installation at 7th and Williams — that some cyclists are traveling too fast for the situation.

Do bikes need slowing down?

“Some do,” said Wilson, recalling recent experiences near his neighborhood in Congress Park. “I see bikes fly through, going way too fast.”

The chances for a mishap are multiplied by a lack of clarity in how cyclists are supposed to treat stop signs along bike lanes, he said.

Residents around Seventh and Williams who bike themselves, said that their primary concern is with safety, and emphasize that the pace of incidents bodes poorly for coming months. Several reported close calls at the intersections, in addition to the listed incidents, and residents also noted regular confrontations between cyclists and drivers, including a lengthy shouting match that took place Thursday.

“I think it is worth emphasizing that every one of these accidents occurred as a direct result of changes DOTI put in place,” resident Mark Turnage wrote The Denver Gazette. “The number of accidents dwarf the documented accidents in this stretch of 7th Avenue in the prior five years.”

City data provided to residents during the rollout for the bikeway shows four car accidents at the intersection over a period from 2015 to 2019, but no bike crashes and no pedestrian-involved accidents. The nearest bike accident over that period was four blocks west. An online “Crash Data Dashboard” offered to The Denver Gazette by Denver Police Department currently shows as “unavailable.”

“Unless they change things, these accidents will continue,” Turnage said. “That is obvious to everyone in the neighborhood watching both cars and bikes negotiate these new obstacle courses.”

Meanwhile, the city plans no further modifications to the intersection.

“We are committed to making our streets as safe as possible and will continue to monitor the new installation,” the city’s transportation department said in an email. “There are no plans to make additional changes to the bikeway at this time, other than what we outlined in the memo.”

The department added: “Best practice dictates at least a 6-month period for traffic patterns to settle before making major changes to new roadway configurations.”