Denver Bike Route Safety Map

Denver is two cycling cities stacked on the same grid. One is a creek-and-river trail system you can cross most of the city on without meeting a car. The other is a set of arterials that Streetsblog Denver described as just 5 percent of the street network but the site of about 50 percent of all traffic fatalities between 2011 and 2015. A route can move between the two in a single block, and the score is what makes that visible. Brakeaway rates any Denver route 0–100 on protected infrastructure, trail and neighborhood-bikeway connectivity, intersection risk, traffic exposure, and surface quality. Paste a Google Maps link, upload a GPX, or connect Strava. Scores are informational estimates — not a substitute for local judgment. Verify conditions before you ride.

Score a Denver route

How Brakeaway scores a Denver route

Every route is analyzed across five factors, weighted for the conditions Denver riders actually meet: a strong grade-separated trail spine along the creeks and the river, a young and still-thin protected-lane network, a growing set of traffic-calmed residential bikeways, and a handful of arterials that swallow most of the city's serious crashes.

Protected infrastructure and trail connectivity. What share of your line sits on a grade-separated path, a parking-protected bikeway, or a traffic-calmed residential street? Denver Streets Partnership describes the city's "high comfort" category as including "protected bike lanes, which have a vertical barrier between vehicular traffic and people on bikes, and neighborhood bikeways, where traffic calming treatments reduce vehicular speeds and volumes" — Brakeaway separates those two, because a concrete curb and a speed cushion do not do the same work. Segments on the Cherry Creek Trail, the South Platte River Trail, the High Line Canal Trail and the parking-protected Broadway Bikeway score at the top of this factor.
Intersection and arterial-crossing risk. Streetsblog Denver reported that "streets like Federal Boulevard, Colfax Avenue, Colorado Boulevard, and Broadway — what Denver Public Works calls 'arterial' streets — make up 96 percent of the high-injury network." Brakeaway penalizes riding along those corridors and crossing them unprotected, which is why an otherwise quiet numbered avenue can shed a band at one crossing.
Traffic volume and exposure. Paint beside fast-moving general traffic is scored as exposure, not protection. DOTI's own neighborhood-bikeway guidance treats a local street as a candidate for traffic circles where "daily vehicle volumes are less than ~2,000" — an order of magnitude below the arterials the network is trying to route riders away from, and the model reflects that gap.
Surface quality and seasonal hazards. Denver's creek trails are mostly smooth concrete and asphalt, but they run in the floodplain by design. During a Cherry Creek Dam sediment flush, National Weather Service officials in Boulder warned that "Higher flows will cause higher than normal creek stages and potential flooding of the bike paths and stream crossings," while the Army Corps of Engineers put the release at flows that "fluctuate between 150 and 1,300 cubic feet per seconds." Brakeaway scores surface and structure, not today's weather, so a trail's score assumes the underpass is dry.
Elevation and grade. The river and creek corridors are close to flat because they follow water. Routes that climb west toward the Front Range foothills, or out of the Cherry Creek and South Platte valleys onto the surrounding grid, carry real sustained gradient. Grade is folded into the score rather than reported beside it.

Highest-scoring Denver bike routes

These are the routes that repeatedly land in Brakeaway's High Confidence band, because the separation is physical rather than painted.

Cherry Creek Trail — Confluence Park southeast through Glendale

Denver's defining commuter path. Visit Denver calls it "the 40-mile Cherry Creek Trail," and Great Runs notes that "It generally follows a north-south direction, paralleling Speer Blvd." The reason it scores the way it does is vertical: Uncover Colorado describes how "Large portions of the trail lie just below Speer Boulevard, offering enough separation from city traffic to make you forget you're just a ramp or path away from the center of things." A trail in the creek channel meets far fewer signalized crossings than a street route covering the same ground, and Brakeaway's intersection factor rewards that heavily. Great Runs also notes that "the two-mile section between Speer/Colfax and Lower Downtown (LoDo) has separate trails for pedestrians and cyclists on each side of the creek," which is why that stretch scores above a typical shared path — mode separation is scored, not assumed. The trade-off is the floodplain: the same underpasses that remove the intersections fill during cloudbursts and dam releases.

South Platte River Trail and the Mary Carter Greenway

The north–south spine. Visit Denver describes "the 36-plus-mile South Platte River Trail," and in its longer regional form — "Consisting of the Mary Carter Greenway and the South Platte River Trail, the 35-mile route runs from Chatfield State Park, about 15 miles south of downtown Denver, to the Elaine T. Valente Open Space in Thornton." Through central Denver it is grade-separated, paved, and continuous, which is an unusual combination for an American river trail of that length. It scores highest between the downtown parks and the southern suburbs; the industrial reaches north of downtown score lower on surface and on the quality of the street connections back to the grid.

Confluence Park — where the two trails meet

The junction that makes the network a network. Great Runs puts it plainly: "The best section starts at Confluence Park, appropriately named for the confluence with the South Platte River Trail." For route planning, Confluence is the pivot — nearly any cross-town Denver ride that wants to stay off arterials is really a question of how to reach one of the two trails, ride the confluence, and leave again. Brakeaway scores the trail-to-street transitions at each end separately, and those transitions are usually where a route loses its points.

High Line Canal Trail

The long one. Denver Water states that the trail "meanders 71 miles across the Denver area" and that the canal "runs 71 miles east-northeast through Douglas, Arapahoe, and Denver counties"; Visit Denver calls "The 71-mile sinuous High Line Canal Trail … one of the longest urban trails in America." It is a canal-side corridor with soft and paved segments depending on jurisdiction, so scores vary by reach — Brakeaway treats a surface change as a scoring event rather than smoothing over it. Where it is paved and car-free, it is among the highest-scoring infrastructure in the metro.

Broadway Bikeway — 7th Avenue to Center Avenue

Denver's marquee protected on-street corridor, and the best current example of what the city can build inside an arterial. Denver Streets Partnership describes a "two-way, parking-protected bikeway on the east side of Broadway" with "concrete curbs to protect people in the bikeway from vehicles," notes that "the bi-directional bikeway extends from 7th Ave to Center Ave," and that "South Broadway now fully connects to the Cherry Creek Trail." It took "almost 10 years of planning," with construction starting in Fall 2022 and completed in Winter 2023. Physical curb separation on a High Injury Network street is exactly the case where Brakeaway's score departs sharply from what the underlying road classification would suggest.

Clear Creek Trail and the northwest connection

Visit Denver: "The Clear Creek Trail is an 18-mile trail that connects with the South Platte River Trail." For riders on Denver's northwest side it is the way out of the city that does not involve an arterial, and the junction with the South Platte is one of the few places where two long car-free corridors meet without a street crossing in between.

Bear Creek Trail — west toward Morrison

Visit Denver notes that "the Bear Creek Trail follows Bear Creek and heads 12.5 miles west to Morrison." It is the standard car-light escape toward the foothills, and the point where Denver's flat-trail scoring gives way to genuine sustained climbing. Brakeaway's grade factor does most of the work on the western half.

Denver by district — what to expect

Downtown, LoDo and the Central Platte Valley

The two trail spines cross here, and the underpass geometry means a rider can move across the core without meeting a signalized arterial. Above street level the picture is thinner and mostly paint. The 5280 Trail is the long-term fix: the City describes it as "an envisioned linear park around the downtown core of Denver that includes 5.280 miles of dedicated Links and Places connecting neighborhoods and people." The first physical piece is small and real — "a two-block segment of the 5280 Trail on Acoma Street from 10th to 12th Avenues," with design finishing in summer 2026 and construction running from fall 2026 through the end of 2027.

Capitol Hill, City Park West and Whittier

The densest concentration of current construction in the city. DOTI's active project list includes N Williams Street from E 21st to E 31st Avenue, N Lafayette Street and N Marion Street from E 21st to E 36th Avenue, E 28th Avenue from Glenarm Place to N Vine Street, E 21st Avenue from Downing to York, and Tremont Place / 24th Street / Glenarm Place from E 20th Avenue to 26th Street. Scores in this quarter of the city are a moving target — re-score a familiar commute here every few months.

West Washington Park, Baker and the Broadway corridor

The Broadway Bikeway anchors this district and links south Denver to the Cherry Creek Trail. DOTI is building E Virginia Avenue / E Dakota Avenue from S Broadway Street to S Marion Street Parkway, tying the bikeway into the parkway network. South Marion Street Parkway itself is the corridor where, in July 2019, Alexis Bounds was killed — CPR reported that "Alexis Bounds, 37, was struck and killed by a dump truck taking a right turn." CPR also quoted Bicycle Colorado's policy director on the street: "It can seem like a tranquil street … but in reality, it's one of the highest-traffic bike routes in the city." Denverite later reported that the parkway "is getting a protected bike lane." That sequence — high bike volume, low physical protection, a fatal turning conflict, a rebuild — is the pattern Brakeaway's intersection factor exists to surface before the fact.

Northwest — Highland, Berkeley, Sunnyside and Regis

This is long-standing neighborhood-bikeway territory: DOTI has studied "the traffic circles installed on the W 35th Ave Neighborhood Bikeway in 2018," and the Northwest Community Transportation Network remains one of the more built-out residential grids in the city. Current design-phase work includes Clay Street / W Dunkeld Place from W 32nd to W 29th Avenue in Highland Park and Lowell Boulevard / N Meade Street from W 46th to W 52nd Avenue in Berkeley and Regis. The offsetting hazard is Federal Boulevard, which cuts the district in half.

West and Southwest — Westwood, Athmar Park, Villa Park

Historically the thinnest coverage, and currently the biggest build-out. DOTI has W Kentucky Avenue from S Lowell to S Federal Boulevard, W Ohio Avenue from S Vallejo to S Clay Street, Knox Court from W Kentucky to W Alameda Avenue, and N Tennyson Street / W 7th Avenue in Villa Park. These are residential bikeways rather than protected arterial lanes, so they score as calmed streets — meaningfully better than paint, meaningfully below a trail.

East and Far Northeast — Park Hill, Stapleton area, Green Valley Ranch

Kearney Street / Krameria Street from E Virginia Avenue to E Smith Road is under construction across several east-side neighborhoods, and Green Valley Ranch Boulevard from Peña Boulevard to Tower Road is listed as complete. The far northeast is a long-block, wide-street environment, so scores depend almost entirely on whether a bikeway exists on your specific line rather than one street over.

The roads Denver riders route around

The High Injury Network, generally. Streetsblog Denver reported the core finding: "Combined, these 27 streets are just 5 percent of the city's street network, but they were the site of 130 deadly collisions, or about 50 percent of all traffic fatalities, between 2011 and 2015." Those 27 streets are overwhelmingly arterials — 96 percent of the network, by the same report — and they are also the streets that go where you want to go. Most of the score damage on a Denver route happens where your line touches one.

Federal Boulevard and Alameda Avenue. The city has singled these two out. CBS Colorado reported that an "18-month pilot program will focus on mitigating traffic along Federal Boulevard from 52nd Avenue to Lloyd Avenue and on Alameda Avenue from Sheridan Boulevard to Havana Street," with the blunt physics behind it: "Someone who is hit at 40 miles per hour is 8 times more likely to die than someone who is hit by a driver at 25 miles per hour." Brakeaway flags both corridors hard along their full flagged extents.

Colfax Avenue, Colorado Boulevard and Broadway north of the bikeway. All three are named in the same Streetsblog analysis of Denver's arterial high-injury network. Broadway is the instructive case: the protected bikeway between 7th Avenue and Center Avenue scores in a completely different band from the unprotected sections of the same street, which is why "Broadway" is not a single answer.

The trend line. Denver Streets Partnership reports that "Last year, 93 people were killed on our streets" and that "2025 was the highest yet," against a city commitment to "eliminate traffic fatalities and serious injuries by the year 2030." Brakeaway does not model that trend — it models the road in front of you — but it is the reason the arterial penalties are as heavy as they are.

What Denver is building, and why your score may change

Denver's network is genuinely mid-construction, which matters for anyone scoring the same commute twice. PeopleForBikes reports that "Today, Denver has completed 442 miles of the Denver Moves Bicycle Network, approximately one-half of the network mileage envisioned in the original 2016 plan," and that the Final Mile program allowed the city "to build more than 109 miles of new bikeways since 2019, tripling the pace of previous construction." DOTI says it "constructed more than 50 miles of bikeways in 2023 through the CTN program" alone.

The forward plan is bigger. The Denver Moves: Bikes Update "represents a 20-year vision for bicycling in Denver," and Denver Streets Partnership reported that "the current draft identifies more than 230 miles of new facilities," organized so that "the Core Network should be a grid of north-south and east-west routes, spaced one half to one mile apart." The city's stated access goal is that "all residents are within a two minute ride (a quarter mile) of a bikeway they feel safe and comfortable riding," against a present-day baseline where "about 6% of residents commute by bicycling or walking" and a target that "by 2050, 20 percent of all trips are done by walking, bicycling, or micromobility device."

Practically: a Denver corridor that scores in the Caution band today may not in eighteen months. Re-score anything you ride regularly.

Things worth knowing before your first Denver ride

The trails are the network; the streets are the connectors. Unlike cities where the bike network is a street grid with trails attached, Denver's strongest infrastructure follows water. Plan the trail segment first and solve the last mile second — that is also the order in which Brakeaway's factors will reward you.

Underpasses are the feature and the risk. Grade separation under Speer Boulevard is why the Cherry Creek Trail scores as well as it does. It is also why the Army Corps of Engineers has warned that "Higher flush releases may cause minor flooding at low-level crossings or access points downstream of the dam including bike paths," and why the National Weather Service told riders that "The public is urged not to attempt to cross the creek during this event." A high score is a statement about the infrastructure, not about today's water level.

Shared bikes changed hands in 2026. Denver's bike-share nonprofit "shut B-cycle down" in early 2020. The city later "announced it would let both contracts expire and hand the entire market to Veo"; "Veo's vehicles went out on May 1, 2026," the operator "can run up to 9k vehicles, about 70% of them seated," and "Veo counted more than 931k trips in its first six weeks." Brakeaway scores a shared trip exactly like a trip on your own bike.

The e-bike rebate is a real budget line. Denver's Office of Climate Action, Sustainability and Resiliency "launched an e-bike rebate program in 2022." The current structure: "The standard rebate from CASR is $675 and can be used in conjunction with a $225 rebate from the state of Colorado, which means buyers can receive up to $900 off," released in batches — "CASR releases 600 at a time." None of this changes a route's score; it changes how many people are on the route.

The crowdsourced map is worth knowing about. Bike Streets maintains a Low-Stress Denver Bike Map built as "a crowdsourcing project to tap into local knowledge of how to comfortably get around Denver on a bike," assembling what it calls the "Best Available Network" out of trails, protected infrastructure, calm residential streets, sidewalks and alleys. It answers a different question from a score — where riders already go, versus what a given line measures — and the two are useful together.

Resources

Frequently asked questions

Is Brakeaway free to use for Denver routes?

Yes. Scoring routes — in Denver or any other city Brakeaway covers — is free. Upload a GPX file, paste a Google Maps directions link, or connect Strava to import existing rides. Every score is informational data, not a substitute for local judgment; verify conditions before you ride.

Which Denver trails score highest?

The fully separated ones. Visit Denver describes the Cherry Creek Trail as 40 miles and the South Platte River Trail as more than 36 miles; the two meet at Confluence Park, named for the confluence of the creek and the river. The High Line Canal Trail runs 71 miles east-northeast through Douglas, Arapahoe and Denver counties and is described by Visit Denver as one of the longest urban trails in America. The Clear Creek Trail is an 18-mile trail that connects with the South Platte River Trail. These paths carry Brakeaway's highest factor weight because the separation is physical rather than painted.

What is a Denver neighborhood bikeway, and how does Brakeaway score one?

DOTI defines neighborhood bikeways as low-volume, low-speed streets designed to prioritize people who are biking, walking, and rolling by using design elements such as signage, pavement markings, speed and/or volume reduction features, and crossing improvements. The toolkit includes medians, mini traffic circles, pinchpoints, diverters, curb extensions, speed cushions and chicanes, and DOTI notes that traffic circles typically go on local streets where daily vehicle volumes are less than about 2,000. Brakeaway scores a treated bikeway above a painted lane on a busier street, because the treatments suppress traffic rather than sitting beside it — but below a genuinely separated path, because motor vehicles are still present.

Which Denver roads does Brakeaway flag hardest?

The arterials on Denver's High Injury Network. Streetsblog Denver reported that 27 streets are just 5 percent of the city's street network but were the site of 130 deadly collisions, or about 50 percent of all traffic fatalities, between 2011 and 2015, and that streets like Federal Boulevard, Colfax Avenue, Colorado Boulevard and Broadway — arterials — make up 96 percent of that network. Denver Streets Partnership reports that 93 people were killed on Denver's streets in 2025, the highest total yet. Brakeaway penalizes both riding along those corridors and crossing them without a signal or refuge.

Does Brakeaway account for Denver's hills and altitude?

Grade is one of the five scoring factors, so it is already inside the number rather than reported separately. Denver's river and creek corridors are close to flat, while routes climbing west toward the Front Range foothills, or out of the Cherry Creek and South Platte valleys, carry sustained gradient. Altitude is not a scoring factor — Brakeaway scores infrastructure risk, not physiology — but riders arriving from lower elevations often find Mile High City climbs harder than the profile suggests.

How does Brakeaway treat e-bikes and Denver's shared Veo fleet?

Identically to a trip on your own acoustic bike — pedal assist does not change the infrastructure under the wheels. Denver's bike-share nonprofit shut B-cycle down in early 2020, and the city later handed the entire shared-micromobility market to Veo, whose vehicles went out on May 1, 2026 and which can run up to 9,000 vehicles, about 70 percent of them seated; Veo counted more than 931,000 trips in its first six weeks. If you bought with a city rebate, that changes nothing about the score either: CASR launched its e-bike rebate program in 2022, and the standard rebate is $675, which can be combined with a $225 rebate from the state of Colorado for up to $900 off.

How often is Denver route data updated?

Infrastructure data is refreshed monthly from OpenStreetMap and published City and County of Denver and regional datasets. New bikeway openings — the Community Transportation Network projects on Lafayette and Marion, Pearl and Emerson, Kearney and Krameria, and the Acoma Street segment of the 5280 Trail — are reflected in scores within about 30 days of appearing in the source data.

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Last updated: September 24, 2026.