Blueprint Denver Street Typologies

When the City and County of Denver began work on their Land Use and Transportation Plan, they broke with tradition and pursued an innovative new approach to simultaneously addressing both land use and transportation. Moving away from the traditional functional classification, the City and County developed street typologies in an attempt to balance the design and operational characteristics of a street with the competing needs of adjacent land uses, and the streets function for pedestrians, bicyclists, and transit. Street design often ignores, or de-emphasizes, land use other modes of travel when it is based solely on the traditional functional classification. The design of a street, its intersections, sidewalks, and transit stops should reflect the adjacent land uses since the type and intensity of the adjacent land use directly influences the level of use by other modes. New street identifiers such as “mixed use” and “commercial” streets now supplement the traditional labels of arterial, collector and local streets. These typologies provide new direction for both land use and transportation planning and design purposes. As jurisdictions struggle to accommodate increasingly complex demands within the street and land use realm, street typologies provide an efficient means of addressing these demands.

The City and County are currently in the midst of developing comprehensive, multi-modal street design guidelines to be incorporated into the City’s newly created design standards manual. This includes the development and implementation of standard cross-sections that blend street typology priority elements with fixed elements from the City’s original utility standards; development of a multi-modal guidelines matrix categorized by street type and functional class; and guidelines for key design elements.