Overview:
With homicides down but traffic deaths rising, Denver police and advocates outline competing visions for improving traffic safety in 2026.
As Denver closed out 2025 with one of its sharpest drops in violent crime in decades, another troubling trend moved in the opposite direction: traffic deaths.
Police recorded just 37 homicides last year — a nearly 50% decline from 2024 — but the city ended the year with 95 traffic fatalities, making it one of Denver’s deadliest years on the roads in recent history.
For drivers like Grace Weitzel, a 21 year-old student from Colorado Springs, Denver’s road conditions already shape daily decisions. She drives between Boulder and Colorado Springs once or twice a month to visit her family and plans her trips according to the least congested and dangerous times of day.
“I would rather leave my house [later] than drive through rush-hour traffic,” she said. “The options are just so bad; like on a Friday I’ll try to get home and will need to leave [early] in order to be there by a reasonable hour.”
In an effort to make the roads safer for drivers like Weitzel, the Denver Police Department said it will focus more on traffic safety in 2026, with plans to increase traffic-unit staffing and expand photo radar enforcement. Denver Police Chief Ron Thomas said the department’s renewed focus aligns with the city’s Vision Zero initiative, which aims to eliminate all traffic-related deaths on Denver roads by 2030.
Thomas credited the drop in violent crime to faster police response times, medical intervention and long-term prevention strategies, including investments in lighting, technology and community activation. He said that same philosophy of visible presence paired with targeted enforcement will guide traffic safety efforts.
“One of the things that has led to the perception of Denver not being as safe a city as it actually is is a sense of lawlessness,” Thomas said in an interview with Bucket List Community News, citing behaviors like motorcycles performing wheelies and cars peeling out in traffic. “We want to have a more consistent presence in those areas where these unsafe behaviors are taking place.”
At the same time, Thomas also stresses the importance of equity when it comes to traffic enforcement. According to the DPD, pulling over for minor offenses like a broken light or a recently expired plate can have unintended, unjust and negative consequences for protected groups.
“We really want to limit that disparate impact,” he said. “And it also saves us the time to focus on things that are more important.”
While everyone acknowledges that the city’s traffic is a problem, not everyone agrees that increasing police presence is the best solution. Jill Locantore, executive director of the Denver Streets Partnership, said enforcement-heavy approaches risk reinforcing inequities without addressing the underlying causes of dangerous driving.
Rather than increasing policing, Locantore advocates for the use of automated enforcement, including photo speed vans and installed red light cameras. “We would like the city to follow through on its commitment to start implementing it on the most dangerous streets,” she said.
Denver Streets Partnership’s mission is to reduce the Denver public’s reliance on cars for transportation. This means making it safer, easier and more convenient for people to walk, bike and use public transportation around the city.
“Safety is a huge barrier that prevents people from choosing to use modes other than driving,” she said. “You are literally taking your life in your hands when you try to cross a busy street like Federal Boulevard or Colorado Boulevard.”
The danger to pedestrians has only increased, with Denver experiencing a 35% increase in pedestrian deaths in 2025.
“That’s [policing] also a short-term solution,” Locantore said. “In the long term, really what we want the city to do is redesign those dangerous streets to make it more difficult to speed in the first place.”
Still, the city’s police chief argues that since “one of the more significant increases we saw in accidents and traffic deaths was on our highway systems,” Thomas said, “that is going to be a significant part of our effort this year.”
As 2026 begins, Denver officials, advocates and drivers want roads to be safer, more predictable and less congested.
“I just want my commute to be easy and consistent,” Weitzel said. “It sucks always having to text my mom and sisters, pushing my ETA back.”
