How to Make Biking Safer in Denver
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Hi, I’m Allen Cowgill. I live in the Sloan’s Lake neighborhood of Denver and have lived in Denver for Oh, gosh, almost 20 years now and, uh, it’s been in North Denver the whole time and love it out here. Originally from Cincinnati, Ohio, went to college in St. Louis and I’ve been here ever since.
I was not going to ask this question, but wait, is Cincinnati the city that’s on the lake?
That’s Cleveland. Cincinnati is on the river and that’s a very offensive question to ask for someone from Cincinnati to confuse us with Cleveland because there’s like a nice, you know, cross Ohio rivalry going on there. So I’ll let it slide on this one time, but no, yeah, it’s a, it’s a great city. It was fun to grow up at, but you know, Colorado’s home now.
So why do you think I reached out to you?
I don’t know for sure. I’m guessing it’s probably cause I’m an over poster on social media, but it could be wrong.
That might be slightly right. But there’s more to it, which is I follow all of your biking adventures. We’ll get into that in a second. Not even in a second.
We’ll get into that later on in the conversation, but. I wanted to know, you know, we’re talking about how you got there. I want you to take me to a place that was play space or experience. That was super awesome. And take us along for the ride and listeners. I have no idea what this story is going to be.
Our family about four or five years ago. Purchased a cargo bike, a Tern GSD. It’s pretty much like an SUV for families that want to bike because I can fit on the front. My spouse, my wife can fit on the front and we can put our two kids on the back. We can kind of go anywhere. And so we’ve kind of done this thing in, in the summers and fall and spring, when the weather’s nicer, we’ll just be like, where are we going to go this weekend?
And the great thing about this bike is, you know, the range is like massive. Like you can. Put two batteries on there and you can go 50, you know, 60, 70. If you put on eco mode, you can even go like a hundred miles without having to recharge. Yeah. Yeah. So it’s, it’s a lot of fun. And then a year or two later, my wife was sick of being the person without an electric bike of having to go up the Hills while I was just kind of, you know, like, you know, going up the Hills a lot more easier.
So she got one. So now it’s a family thing, like where all of us will go and we’ll take our two kids. They’re now six and eight to places. And I think for me. The most fun, uh, recent place that we went to was Clear Creek Canyon. So, Clear Creek Canyon is just past Golden. And, there’s this bike path called the Clear Creek Trail.
It runs all the way from the Platte River in kind of Denver, Commerce City area, all the way up there, but we’ll hop on it. Kind of we’re in North Denver. So we’ll hop on it near Regis University and we’ll do this fun thing. We’ll just pick playgrounds along the way for our kids to go and stop at, um, which is a lot of fun for them.
It keeps them kind of entertained. We’ll put a podcast on with a little Bluetooth speaker in the back. So they’re kind of entertained while we’re going places. And, um, Uh, Colorado recently opened this new, uh, multi use path called the Peaks to Plains Trail, and it is absolutely amazing. It starts in Golden, so we biked out to Golden, it takes like an hour or two to get out there, and it just goes up the canyon.
And it’s just absolutely stunning, you got these beautiful canyon walls on either side of you, and there’s this old bloom back from, I think, from like the mining days and stuff like that, this, this wooden, uh, structure that used to transport water down the canyon and the trail veers off from, you know, highway six at one point.
So it’s just kind of you and people walking and biking back there and it’s just absolutely stunning. And the kids went down and they’re throwing rocks in the creek and stuff like that in the river. Yeah. Clear Creek, I guess it is not a river, but yeah, it was a blast. We had a fun time.
Wait, so I have a couple of questions.
Is it hard to ride your bike from, from where you’re at in the Sloan’s Lake neighborhood, Golden? Like, is that a pretty easy trek? Is it, are you on a trail? Is, I guess, my question.
You are! Once you get to the Clear Creek Trail, you’re pretty much On the trail until you’re in golden, there’s a few road crossings that you have to go through or over once you get into golden, but they’re relatively tame.
So yeah, it’s actually surprisingly easy to bike to golden from Denver. A lot of the people that are more road cyclists, they’ll take 32nd Avenue out there, but for folks like us, their families that want to have a little more slower pace or have water fountains or playgrounds along the way, the Kirkuk trail is a great way to get out there and you can take it pretty much the entire way to golden.
And then from Golden, you just get on the, what is the name of this other trail?
It’s called the Peaks to Plains Trail. Yeah. I’ve
heard of this. And I, didn’t they do like a major expansion of that trail?
Yeah. Yeah. They’re in the process. They’re spending, I think, tens of millions of dollars to do this trail.
It’s incredible. And it goes up Clear Creek Canyon. We, we went when the first phase. Was open. And I think they’ve got an, I don’t know if they’ve opened the new phase yet, but they’ve got another phase of it. That’s going to expand it even more back up the Canyon. So yeah, it’s just, it’s beautiful. It’s, it’s a really fun way to kind of feel like you’re in the mountains and be able to bike from Denver pretty, pretty easily.
Have you ever done the trail from Denver to Boulder?
That is on our list. Um, we’ve thought about. Doing an overnight trip there, where we just throw everything on our cargo bikes and go up to Boulder and take that path up there. I’ve made it about halfway. I’ve made it as far as Broomfield, but I haven’t gone all the way to Boulder yet, but that’s on, on my list.
The reason why I haven’t done that trail yet is I can’t figure out how to, how to find the starting point. So I think that’s the only thing that’s confusing to me is where do I get on the trail? And my goal, I think the easiest way is to go to Sheridan by bus and then somehow figure out where it is from there visually.
Yeah. Yeah. That’s a great way to do it. Take Sheridan up to us 36 and there’s like, I think there’s a bus stop there and that’s a great easy way to connect from, you know, just about anywhere in the metro area. If you want to be adventurous and bike up there, it’s definitely, it’s. You’re not alone. Like it took me a while to figure out, like, how do I get to this trail?
There’s no real good connection for it right now. Um, one option is that, um, you can take the clear creek trail. So I think it’s called a little dry creek trail. Um, and that will go up. You go kind of past the Westminster. Beeline station where the commuter rail ends. Oh yeah. Just a little bit past that you go underneath Lowell Boulevard and then you get off the trail there and I think it’s called Bradburn Street or something like that.
Right around there and then you go north and then you’ll, it’s just kind of like a shared street. Um, it’s not the best but it’s usually relatively quiet with, with traffic. Um, and then you hit US 36 then you just hang a left and that’s, that’s kind of the trail there. Yeah.
Okay. Well, um, I will, I will file that in my.
Things to know for the future, because that is huge on my list. I’ve wanted to do that for like years now. And I just haven’t gotten to it. And for those of you who are like, why are you guys talking about all this bike stuff? Okay. So here’s, here’s the real story. I follow Alan on social media. And one of the things that he does is he is very much a, uh, cycling bike.
Advocate as I perceive him to be, but I think it would be interesting for you to share some of the things that you’re doing and why you’re so passionate about bike life.
Yeah. You know, I think, you know, it started gosh, 10 or 15 years ago. Um, I’m just a bike to work day in downtown Denver that are, um, uh, Dr.
Carter, Denver Regional Council of Governance government’s put on, um, And I was just like, I was the person I either like drove or took the bus into downtown. I was like, bike to work today. Sounds good. There’s some free giveaways. Like you have free breakfast. Like, yeah, I’ll do this. It sounds fun. You know?
Um, and I biked into downtown. I was like, Oh, that was pretty easy. And it’s a lot cheaper than paying for parking. I don’t know why I’m paying for parking. I’ll just do this, you know? So, um, I just kind of got. Started biking to work and I think the more you bike around Denver or really any city for transportation, the more it just kind of like makes you realize like, wow, this could be so much better.
This is not a great setup. You know, you have near, near misses with, with drivers or, you know, God forbid some people even get hit along the way or have scary moments and it’s just like, there’s gotta be something better than this. So there was one particularly one really rough year where within, you 12 months.
I can’t remember how many people it was, but a lot of people biking in Denver were killed by drivers that year. You know, in my neighborhood, David Martinez was hit by a driver and then later died of his injuries. Um, over in wash park, Alexis bounds was killed. Um, you know, I think right before then my neighbor, Gary got hit by a driver and then was subsequently, you know, was now restricted to a wheelchair.
Um, and it’s, it was like, it was rough. Right. And I think sometimes from Bad experiences, you get motivated to try to. Look for something better in the world, right? Sometimes it takes tragedies to really try to look to change the system. Right. And there were a group of folks around Denver, Rob, Jonathan, and John, that started to do this massive ride and they called it Denver bicycle lobby, and it just kind of started.
Right. And it kind of like brought a bunch of people together and be like, yeah, like we can do better than this. Right. And we can give people better transportation options, you know? And, um, that kind of just like made me start thinking about it. Like, and. I got more involved, and I really started just being like, all right, well, how do we get things better?
Like, who’s in charge of this? Who makes the decisions? Like, is it City Council? Is it the Mayor’s office? At the time, it was, you know, Public Works, right? Um, now we call it the Department of Transportation and Infrastructure. Um, Or Dottie for short. And it’s like, all right, what can I do? What can I do to like, make things more positive here?
Right? So things like writing city council members and showing up at community meetings and encouraging others to show up at community meetings. We had one bike lane here that we’re advocating on 23rd Avenue. I literally just went out there on the bike lane and started chalking like bike lane meeting, you know, Tuesday night at KELOLAND dot com.
You know, I can’t remember if it was at the church or, or the nearby like Elks Hall or something like that, but I was, and then I would literally go out there and like hand out flyers and stuff like that. Like, Hey, this is a horrible bike lane. It was like, you literally shared the lane with cars going 30 miles an hour up a hill.
And it’s like, this is bad. We got to get this better. And we’ll just pass out flyers to people like, Hey, would you show up and help support this kind of thing? And people like, yeah, that’s, that’s a cool idea. You know? And it worked. We’ve got to, we got to. Protected bike lane on 23rd Avenue over here in Jefferson Park.
And then through just kind of being, staying engaged, you know, and doing community meetings and stuff like that, you know, councilwoman, Amanda Sandoval asked me to serve on the DOTI advisory boards. I was like, okay, cool. You know? So that’s been a fun experience kind of being on the inside and, and connecting with DOTI leadership and advocating for things, um, And we started a bike bus here in, in my neighborhood too.
That’s kind of a more fun thing. And I think it’s really fun just to give the younger generation an opportunity to experience biking. And, um, that’s, that’s kind of where I am today is, uh, one of the parent leaders of our bike bus at, uh, Brown elementary here in our neighborhood, where my kids go to school.
So
how does a bike bus work for the Lodals?
A bike bus is pretty. It’s pretty much like a roving party of elementary school kids going down the street. We’ve got music. The kids are all riding in one big group. It’s a lot of fun. We now have two routes, one from both sides of the neighborhood. Our school boundary is kind of like this long, narrow rectangle.
So we’ve got one from the west side, one from the east side of our neighborhood. And we meet at a certain time. All the kids will gather. And then we’ll turn on the speaker and Play music, kind of fun music, and then we’ll just bike to school together. Um, and we have adults kind of there watching the kiddos to make sure they’re being safe.
And we’ll bike in a good big group together. And it’s just, it’s really fun. It’s kind of like a fun way to bike to school. I think it’s the statistics is like, it’s only like 10 percent or so of kids. I think are biking to school now. Um, and when I grew up, it was like, and my parents grew up, it was closer to like 50%.
So, um, Biking or walking to school. So I think it’s a really fun opportunity to show like kids that like, Hey, this is possible. And when we do it together in a group, we’ve got safety in numbers and it’s a lot of fun.
When I was little, I was, I went to school in Boulder, which surprises a lot of people. And, um, I remember walking to school and it was so fun, but I’m very curious about the Denver bicycle lobby.
In fact, at the time we’re recording this, I believe there’s a meeting. Tonight somewhere, I feel like it’s a brewery, but what are some of the things that you like? What are some of the dream things that you would love to see in terms of infrastructure or conversation or just what would you love for Denver to do so that it’s a much more bike friendly place, especially because biking has taken over your life.
I say this in like the best sort of way. I love biking. Some of my earliest memories are of learning how to ride my bike. Actually, when I was little, we moved, we were military family. So we moved to Montbello. I feel like that was close to a, I don’t even know, like back in the day, back in the day. And I remember learning how to ride my bike with a banana seat.
One of those and tassels. It was the best, but I do feel having grown up in Boulder and Denver. That Denver is a very big city that often feels like we’re shoving cyclists into the city. I’m always a little concerned when I see some of the cycling, where I see it happening, where I’m like, I’m driving and I am, and I’m not a regular driver.
So when I’m driving, I’m super careful, but it freaks me out to see where some cyclists are. So what would be your dream in terms of initiatives, infrastructure, like what could Denver do to make it a safer cycling city for all?
Yeah, and I think when we think about making it a safer cycling city, it’s really just about giving people choices in their transportation, right?
Uh, 50, the last statistic I saw was about 56, 57 percent of Denverites would be more likely to bike if they had safe and comfortable places to do so. So I think it really comes down to infrastructure. We look at Paris. Harris has had an explosion of people biking in the last few years. And it really just comes down to the leadership of mayor and Hidalgo.
She decided like, Hey, we’re going to put in a bunch of, of safe places for people to bike, bike lanes and bike streets and things like that. And, um, it’s kind of a, you know, When you give people a safe place to go, more people will use it. It’s, it’s induced demand, right? When you create more opportunities for people to be able to choose more sustainable, cheaper transportation, like biking, people will do it.
And I’ve seen that anecdotally here in my neighborhood. North Denver was one of the first places to get what’s called a community transportation network for Denver. And I’ve seen so many more people biking. Biking to work, parents, biking their kids to school or preschool. And it’s not like a cycling advocates like me, just parents being like, Oh my gosh, this is so much easier to drop my kid off at school.
If I just like right up to the playground, as opposed to having to wait in the drop offline and things like that. So I think to kind of come around to the core question is. We need to invest in infrastructure is really what it is, right? We see time after time that the most powerful thing, if you want to increase more people biking, taking scooters in a city, is to give them more infrastructure and ultimately it comes down to budget.
We have some phenomenal planners in our city that have a great concept of bike lane networks that we want to build out, but we don’t have the money for it right now. You know, I think next year we’re spending about You know, 2. 2 million on our bike budget, and that’s for community transportation networks.
And that’s, that’s a really small drop in the bucket. When you compare us to I 25 and Broadway, we redid that highway interchange. I think that was like a 80 or 90 million project just for one exit. Of the highway, right? We expanded I 70 in central Denver. It’s like a billion dollar project, right? So when we we think about in the head, it’s a lot of repercussions with it to write that well beyond just the fiscal impact.
But when we look at. How much we’re spending on it right now they say the city’s values can be found in its budget, and we’re not there and I know it’s been a tough budget year for the city based on sales tax revenues and other, you know, more obligations of taking care of some of our newcomers and things like that.
But we’re still spending a lot of money in other places and I think could really up our game in terms of what we’re spending for bike lanes.
What do you wish people who are new or long term residents thought about as it. Retains to like getting moving around town. I feel like there’s a lot of resistance around alternate modes of transportation.
Do you feel like we would be willing to explore in different ways if it was, is transportation? Outside of cars intimidating for people here, or is it that the systems have a flaw within them? What do you think is going on? Even though I will say people love those scooters. I’m not a fan, but people love the scooters and that’s going to be a thing that kind of, you know, one of the companies is, is phasing that out.
But what do you think would get us to move around differently? That’s really the heart of the question I was trying to ask.
Yeah, I think giving people dignified, practical ways to get around will give people choices, right? I think so, you know, for me, outside of, you know, and we have a car, we have, we were one car family now.
When we got our cargo bikes, we sold our second one, but we use our car from time to time because sometimes it just Doesn’t make sense to use public transportation or bike places just because the amount of time that it takes to get there. So, you know, let’s talk about public transportation first. I think with RTD, it’s a really simple thing that can make it a lot more viable for more people.
Increase frequency, right? Our bus is the 28, you know, the 28, most of the time comes once an hour, right? And that’s, That’s not very practical for most people, right? If I want to take the 28 downtown to Union Station and then hop on the A Line to go to the airport, go visit my mom back in Ohio or whatever, it’s not always very convenient.
Sometimes the timing works well and sometimes the timing is such that, you know, they’ll take a really long time to get to the airport. Or if I wanted to go over to University of Colorado for a medical appointment or something like that out in Anschutz in Aurora. It’s not Super easy to do that for a lot of people.
So there’s been all these studies in the Denver streets partnership. You know, one of our amazing nonprofits here in town in conjunction with others did this study by just increasing transit service frequency by 10 percent has the potential to save so much time for people because it’s not practical for people to spend two hours trying to get from one side of town to the other.
So, but when you have buses that come every 15 minutes, You don’t really have to worry about the schedule as much. You just show up and worst case scenario, wait 15 minutes and it’s not the end of the world. And even if our high frequency corridors, five or 10 minute frequency would make it amazing and make it a viable option for people to choose transit, right?
So that’s, that’s problem number one is how do we make our bus service more frequent through funding it through our city or through RTD. Problem number two is how do we, for people that choose scooters, bicycles, is how do we give them options, right? And most people, when you talk to them, when they say the reason they’re not biking is, it just doesn’t feel safe, doesn’t feel practical, right?
So it goes back to the infrastructure, right? It’d be really easy for us just to, even if we up our bike budget by, we go from 2. 2 million a year to something like 8 or 10 million a year. That gives us so much potential to add more bike lanes around the city to give people high quality, comfortable, dignified ways for them to choose other transportation options.
Right? So I think that’s the main thing is it has to be practical and it has to be safe for folks and comfortable for folks to do.
Do you think that there’s Maybe we are approaching funding the wrong way. Like maybe there’s a grant or something that we could look into as a city versus taking money out of the existing budget.
Yeah. So I think you’re, you’re, you hit the crux of the question is how do we get more money? Right. So are the city budget itself, there’s really one option that we have right now. There’s this called a special revenue fund called, uh, it’s, I think it’s called like the multimodal. Transportation safety revenue fund right now.
It’s like 8 million a year, but that’s like for safety projects for biking. It’s for pedestrian. It’s for transit. Um, we’ve seen Dottie start to in a tough budget year. We’ve seen Dottie start to be like, Oh, look at this pot of money. This is over here. I think there’s a lot of folks in town. Um, that would ideally like to have that be kept for its initial purpose that Mayor Hancock put it in there for was.
Safety and multimodal, right? So I think that’s one funding source, but ultimately it’s not enough. Our biggest funding source by far is our, you know, federal dollars or state dollars that get filtered in through Dr. Cog, Denver regional council of government. Denver Regional Council of Governments. I think it’s like 50 different entities around the metro area that make up Dr.
Cog from, you know, this is everybody from like Arvada to Mountain View to Denver to Aurora. All of our municipalities are part of this, what’s called an MPO, Metropolitan Planning Organization, which is kind of like our umbrella for how we dole out federal funds, right? And historically. You know, those Dr.
Cog dollars, a large chunk of them end up going towards interstate highway projects, right? Um, and, you know, to speak candidly and in my personal opinion, like those highway projects have caused a lot of harm, right? We’ve bulldozed houses to expand I 70 in Globeville and Elyria, Swansea. We’ve expanded Interstate 25 through communities, and ultimately it’s Creating more air pollution.
Yes, you get more cars through at the end of the day, but it causes more air pollution. My personal opinion is, is that, and Peña Boulevard is, is the next one that’s kind of up for discussion on Dr. Cog dollars, right? So my personal opinion is, is that, that is such a huge source of funding is that we should really consider using those for more sustainable, more safety projects, whether it’s transit related or bike related or pedestrian related, and I think we’ll see a much bigger benefit.
to using those dollars, but that, that is my hope. That is where the real source of funding for major Denver projects come from. If we had just, instead of doing that one I 25 and Broadway intersection, if we just applied that to Denver’s bike and pedestrian network, we would see a world of difference. It would be a completely different city in terms of people’s ability to choose more sustainable or more affordable transportation.
We’re wrapping up, and I guess my last, I have, I think two last questions. One would be, Is there a place that you wish was easier to get to and how would you want to get there? It could be a facility. It could be a town. I don’t know. What’s that one place you’re like, why is it so hard to get here? My
gosh.
Yeah. I mean, I think about, there’s so many places that you could name off in Denver. Like it’s hard to connect to anywhere from Montbello, right. To get to GVR, to Montbello, to get from Montbello down to Central Park. Like it’s
kind for everyone listening is green Valley ranch. And I actually went to Hogan.
park the other day to see Umi, if you get a chance to see that sculpture do. Continue, Alan.
Yeah. So Montbello is one place that’s disconnected. The west side of Denver is so disconnected. Like there’s no, you’ve got this massive valley of interstate highways and a river and railroad tracks. Like there’s so many places that it’s not easy from folks on the west side of town to get into kind of the heart, the middle of Denver.
But if I had to just pick, you know, so those are like more of my practical answers to that question. Right. But if I had to say kind of a fun place. That would be nice to get to, I wish it was easier to get to like Morrison from Denver, like Bear Creek State Park without having to go way down the Platte River Trail.
I wish there was like a straight path from downtown Denver up to Red Rocks that you could easily bike to if you wanted to.
I would 100 percent agree.
It’d be great if there was transit to Red Rocks too. I know Ian Thomas Tafoya, kind of a local activist here with Green Latinos and former mayoral candidate, has been pushing for a bus to Red Rocks so people could take public transit there.
And I think that would be amazing as well, or any Denver mountain parks, it would be fun for people to be able to get there more easily.
I love it. So how can we support the work you’re doing and follow wherever you are?
If folks are interested in Bicycle Advocacy, denverbicyclelobby. com is a great place to go to.
All the social channels are listed there. I’m on threads at allencogill or allen. cogill. I can’t remember what it is, but A L L E N C O W G I L L is one place to find me. Slowly dialing down my, my Twitter X presence. I think there’s a lot of ways to stay involved. Just knowing who your city council person is asking for more funding for bike lanes and safer bike connections.
If you notice there’s something that’s not working in your neighborhood, just asking it. I think, you know, the squeaky wheel gets greased sometimes. And it’s nice to know that it’s one call to your city council rep or your state rep is can make a really big difference in the grand scheme of things, if
everybody does it.
And also I know who to call if I ever do the ride down 36.
That’s right. Call me anytime. I’ll give you the detailed directions and yeah.
Yes. Well, thank you, Alan, so much for being my guest on the show. How you got there. Thank you so much.
I just want to say one thing for people that bike. I was walking down.
Wine Coop Street the other day and I noticed a Colorado Car Share car and it has bike racks on it. I was just like, that is so cool. So if you do want to go out and mountain bike out of town and or take your bike up to the mountains and go for a lovely gravel ride or road bike ride up in the mountains, that’s a really cool option.
I didn’t know that existed until the other day. So just want to give a shout out to Colorado Car Share for having that bike option as well.
Actually, and another thing that you may not know is there are certain cars in the fleet that have parks passes as well.
That’s awesome. I love that. It’s
pretty awesome.
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