Work has begun on the installation of protected bike lanes on both Arapahoe and Lawrence Streets in Downtown Denver! This represents significant progress in providing dedicated, safe, and legible infrastructure for a sustainable and popular mode of transportation in our urban core. These are big projects, stretching from the edge of the Auraria Campus at Speer Boulevard to 24th Street in Curtis Park. That’s a little more than a mile for each street.

For information about these projects, check out these links:

Denver Public Works: http://goo.gl/FYoMJM

BikeDenver Blog: http://goo.gl/Q8bxpw

David at Streetsblog Denver covered this project extensively back in August: http://goo.gl/va5HQE

For those of you who enjoy reading civil engineering drawings (I know you’re out there!) and want to see some of the nitty gritty of what these lanes will look like, here are links to download PDFs for the Signing and Striping Plans (90%) for Arapahoe and Lawrence. Disclaimer: I got these from Denvergov.org and they are the 90% design, which is not 100%, so there will be some minor differences between these drawings and what gets built. But 90% is close enough to give you a good idea of what these lanes’ designs will look like.

These will also be the first protected bike lanes in Downtown that use, for some of the blocks, on-street parking as the buffer between the vehicle travel lanes and the bike lane plus a 4-foot extra buffer with the little vertical bollards. Here’s a diagram from the BikeDenver blog:

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Finally, I will leave you with some nice photos of the beginning of the restriping work, thanks to DenverUrbanism reader Mike H. Thanks, Mike!

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Beginning installation of protected bike lane on Arapahoe Street. Photo courtesy of Mike H.

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Beginning installation of protected bike lane on Arapahoe Street. Photo courtesy of Mike H.

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Beginning installation of protected bike lane on Arapahoe Street. Photo courtesy of Mike H.

This is exciting to see, and many similar projects will hopefully follow in the near future!