| PROJECT NAME: | New bike lane with protected intersections using the Zipper® and Vectorial® systems. |
| CITY: | Denver, CO. USA |
| LOCATION: | Market St. & Blake St. |
| INSTALLATION DATE: | April 2023. |
In May 2023, the NACTO Designing Cities annual conference was held in Denver, Colorado.
In 2020, NACTO chose the City of Denver as a partner to promote the development of high-quality cycling infrastructure within the city. Moreover, the city demonstrated its commitment to achieving Vision Zero goals through several notable projects in recent years. For these reasons, NACTO selected Denver as the host city for the 2023 annual conference. Improving the safety of the city’s bike lanes, and particularly the intersections along Market St. and Blake St., had been one of the city’s fundamental commitments. The project was inaugurated and showcased as a success story during the conference.
Need and objectives of the project.
The Denver’s Department of Transportation and Infrastructure (DOTI) created a protected bike lane on each street to manage traffic and provide a more efficient and safe alternative, such as the bike or the PMVs, to navigate around motor vehicles during peak traffic times.
They used modules from ZICLA’s Zipper® system in BAB configuration and vertical delineators to protect the bike lane. A vertical delineation was crucial because, due to the size of most of the vehicles traveling on these streets, a standard horizontal delineation would be outside the driver’s field of vision in the vast majority of the cases.
Considering these traffic characteristics, they also opted for more severe segregation at intersections to protect bike lane users from vehicles making left turns. To address this problem, they created corner islands using Zipper® system modules and medians using Vectorial® system modules. These changes widened the turning radius, improved the intersection visibility, and extended the reaction time for the bike lane user and the driver.
