Denver Moves: Transit

Nelson\Nygaard led the City and County’s first transit-focused transportation plan.

The plan established the community’s vision for transit service and identified capital investment corridors within the City and County of Denver. Since Denver Moves: Transit was finalized, the City and County has rebranded as the Department of Transportation and Infrastructure (DOTI), hired additional staff to support transit programs, and advanced numerous plan goals and projects. However, the original plan did not include a detailed basis for funding and implementing key capital and operating elements of the plan.

Denver Moves: Transit Phase 2 focused on translating the vision into an implementation strategy, intentionally weaving equity into the development and evaluation of investment scenarios and corridor prioritization. Phase 2 supports DOTI’s vision to focus limited resources on the people, places, and assets that have the greatest need. Nelson\Nygaard led a team that used data collected during the pandemic to gain a better understanding of where users are truly transit dependent and develop a plan that places capital and frequent service investments where they are most needed. As part of Phase 2, Nelson\Nygaard built a Bus Delay Analysis Tool (BDAT) dashboard that not only informed the scenario evaluation and prioritization process, but also could be leveraged to analyze bus delay for every segment of Denver’s transit network to prioritize short term investments in bus priority infrastructure.

Our team facilitated several meetings with DOTI to review program priorities emerging from the scenario analysis, stakeholder engagement, and input from other key implementation leads across DOTI and other city departments. The final transit implementation plan serves as a short-, mid-, and long-range guide for DOTI’s transit work program through 2050 to align with the horizon year of the city’s parallel update to its strategic transportation plan.