Live near a dangerous road? This group says they can help Colorado fix it.

When Andrew Allport says he’s been hit by cars on his bicycle, he means he’s been pushed, clipped and shoved, never hard enough to land him in the ER.   

But the point he wants to make is that car-cyclist interactions happen more often than people think and the risks of pedaling around cities like his are something the powers that be aren’t focusing on enough.    

He knows this because he’s co-director of Bike Durango, which advocates for safer streets for cyclists. Many times, he says, he’s gone before the Durango City Council with complaints or to the Colorado Department of Transportation with suggestions on how to calm traffic. 

But it wasn’t until his son was hit while trying to ride his bike across a busy intersection in Durango and ended up at Children’s Hospital in Aurora with a broken pelvis and snapped femur that Allport said he finally got a response that resulted in action. He said CDOT adjusted the pedestrian walk signals at that intersection and at other lights throughout the city. 

By then, Allport said, he had realized that danger was always going to lurk on the streets threading through Durango, because of outdated planning that favors cars and drivers. “People in cars are able to make lots of mistakes and break lots of rules without facing consequences. But if an 11-year-old on a bike gets hit by a car, the consequences are enormous.” 

In Colorado, where crashes involving cyclists and pedestrians reached record highs in 2022 and 2023, the need for town, city, county and state leaders to address the issue is greater than ever. Pedestrian and cyclist crashes fell by 24% in the first six months of 2024, but Allport says the fact that it took his son’s accident to spur change shows they’re chasing the problem instead of attacking it. 

Matt Inzeo, CDOT spokesperson, said historically, it’s been a challenge for many rural communities “to have their main street also be a state highway that serves trips passing through town as often as it serves local activity.” Rural communities also have smaller populations, lower population densities and smaller tax bases, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and these can make it hard to access sufficient capital for infrastructure. 

Having state highways and main streets be one and the same can lead to “speed being the priority,” says Allport, and to smaller communities’ inability to afford the changes that will make their streets and roads safer. 

CDOT’s 2023 progress report shows it has been working to make streets safer, by issuing grants for various pedestrian safety projects, launching a campaign to raise awareness of pedestrian safety and delivering on promises in its Revitalizing Main Streets program to “enhance active transportation safety and strengthen the connection of people to main streets and central economic hubs.” 

But an organization outside of Colorado wants to give the state’s towns and cities even more help slowing car and pedestrian fatalities. And so far, Denver, Grand Junction and Durango have accepted. 

Training for citizen city planners  

The help is coming from a national nonprofit called Strong Towns, which advocates for more resilient cities and towns across North America.

The organization is the creation of Charles “Chuck” Marohn, an American author, land use planner and municipal engineer who believes many of our land use problems stem from a Post World War II “suburban experiment” of “auto-oriented development” that has led to municipalities struggling to afford things like upkeep and adequately staffed public safety departments.

Marohn believes a “bottom-up revolution” of concerned citizens can make cities of all sizes safe, livable and inviting by correcting the grand experiment he says bankrupted population centers and endangered neighborhoods. 

Dangerously designed streets and roads are part of this problem along with old paradigms that give engineers outsize power, Marohn says. Sure, engineers are crucial to good planning, but safe streets depend on policy change, a “proper readjustment of bureaucratic power dynamics” and careful examination of systemic design problems, he says.

Strong Towns also believes communities are failing to address their traffic problems because of widespread misconceptions about the cause of routine crashes. Among them: accidents are mostly “not preventable,” streets are designed to be safe but people do reckless and dangerous things on them, and cities are unable to make roads safer.

But the truth, Strong Towns says, is that many factors contribute to a crash, there are tools towns and cities can use to learn from them and future harm is preventable.  

So in January of 2023, they created a program called the Crash Analysis Studio to “model a new standard of care” for cities, towns and neighborhoods concerned about reducing car-pedestrian and car-cyclist fatalities.  

Analyzing a fatal crash in Durango

Strong Towns says it supports its thousands of members with information on topics like incremental housing and ending highway expansion, courses for making communities more economically prosperous , how-to guides on building safe streets and “community action labs” for its 200 or so chapters. 

The crash analysis studio is for local leaders “wanting to move beyond standard highway-derived design manuals to set a new standard of care for traffic safety,” it says. But a downside is that for a town or city to qualify, someone must have died or been seriously injured. 

Durango tragically qualified on Sept. 14, 2023, when 27-year-old Katie Marie Siegrist was struck by a driver on notoriously dangerous Animas View Drive, which was once a quiet county road but is now flanked by high-density housing, an RV park, river access and a public park. 

Siegrist’s death rattled the community, some of whom blamed Durango’s city council because they’d warned city leaders of the dangers of Animas View Drive and predicted a death, yet the city had failed to adequately address the dangers.  

Devin King, Durango’s multimodal manager, said in 2021 the city “lowered the speed limit, put up some radar feedback signs and put up flags with the new 25 miles per hour.” But it had no streetlights, sidewalks or bike lanes and its narrow shoulders were clogged with brush. The woman who hit Siegrist said she didn’t see her until it was too late. 

The outdated narrative about the crash would have had residents accepting Siegrist’s death “as a tragedy you have to process” without addressing the dangers of the road or attempting to fix them, Allport said. But he saw an opportunity in the crash analysis studio. 

“One thing Strong Towns tries to do is recommend quick and fairly low cost things that people can see in action right away,” he said.

All crashes reviewed by Strong Towns must be nominated by a local resident and meet certain criteria. There must be a documented history of traumatic injuries or deaths at or near the location. Poor street design must be the primary cause of the incident. The crash had to have happened on a city-owned road. And the nominator must be a local resident willing to assist with the analysis.

Strong Towns said it accepted Allport’s nomination of the Animas View Drive crash because scrutiny of the roadway showed it had been dangerous for a long time, and the posted speed limit didn’t meet the speed the road was designed for. It also lacked parking lanes, sidewalks and bike lanes. And while in its previous life it had been a rural state highway, since the state had handed it over to the city of Durango to maintain, the city hadn’t made any changes to the original rural design. 

Experts including local cyclists and city planners along with an architect-urban designer and Marohn analyzed the crash based on data, human testimony and other factors. And they found that Animas View Drive struck out on safety for several reasons, many of which harken back to Inzeo’s remarks about highways cutting through rural towns. But the experts offered an equally long list of possible solutions that were up to the city to take. 

Citizens improving road safety

It’s important to note that the city had already begun efforts to make the street safer, following recommendations from a company that had done its own analysis called Toole Design. Orange flags on speed limit signs had been replaced; the single streetlight at United Campground had been repaired, and flashing “Pedestrian & Bicycle in Road” signs had been installed. 

But King said both the Toole Design and Smart Towns reports gave them safety measures they could start implementing immediately, like improved lighting, shrub, grass and tree trimming and the installation of crosswalks at transit stops once curb ramps have been installed. 

The city has also created an interdisciplinary team of staff from multiple departments to respond to crashes and community concerns, King said. It is starting a speed management plan that will include creating a tool kit for managing speeds in Durango along with quick-build strategies. And “at a high level, the city has been redesigning and reconstructing streets or creating safer crossings where there are safety concerns or a history of crashes,” he said, with a couple of projects going to bid this fall/winter for construction in 2025.

Crash studios in Denver and Grand Junction have produced similar results. Henry Brown, mobility planner for the city of Grand Junction, said the exercise “was effective at demonstrating how conventional crash narratives often lack in specificity, nuance, and empathy.” 

And Ed Cannon, a member of a Denver Strong Towns chapter, says after receiving “commonsensical and very obvious recommendations” their challenge is to figure out how to persuade the city of Denver to spend money on implementing them and how to start conversations “with people who control budgets.” 

The big issue all around is how to fund the vast number of projects Strong Towns recommends for nearly all of the crashes, with solutions remaining to be seen. 

But Allport says Strong Towns has given him a little more hope about the future of Durango’s streets. 

 “It was amazing how quickly they could diagnose the issues and how decisively they came up with improvements. It made you realize that these kinds of situations are so common, and the solutions so well-known at this point that there’s little reason for it to take years and years of study to come up with a fix.”