Every morning on his commute to work, Adam Meltzer must cycle through the intersection of Arapahoe Street and Speer Boulevard. However he crosses, he said, is risky, given the area’s fast-driving and often-distracted motorists.

“If I get hit, I’m the one that’s obviously going to lose. It’s my 170 pounds and my 20-pound bike versus a two-ton car,” the Washington Park East resident said.

It’s a problem that could be solved by expanding and connecting Denver’s disjointed network of bike lanes, Meltzer said.

City officials are planning such an expansion, with more protected and buffered bike lanes around town. That, along with the increasing percentage of people commuting downtown by bike, is putting the city on the brink of a culture shift, advocates say.

And the rest of the city is sure to follow.

“There is that cultural shift where you see more people who look like you, who you can relate to, and once you see that normal people can and do bike when there are good places to bike,” said Ken McLeod, policy director for the Washington, D.C.-based League of American Bicyclists.

Within a decade, Denver could enter the rarified air of large American cities setting the standard as bicycle-friendly communities, McLeod said.

The transformation begins downtown, said Piep van Heuven, policy director for Bicycle Colorado, pointing to a survey from the Downtown Denver Partnership that shows a 36% jump in the number of people commuting to and from downtown by bike between 2016 and 2019.

As of last March, 9% of downtown commuters rode bikes, the survey said.

The increase is likely due to the protected bike lanes built downtown, van Heuven said.

“The mythical tipping point is 10%,” she said. “When you have one out of every 10 vehicles on the streets being a bike, people who are driving start to regularly look out for people on bikes.”

That’s part of the equation, McLeod said. Hitting double digits in different areas across a given town is a milestone of sorts. That — combined with the political will to transform a community and an investment in bicycle infrastructure — can draw other parts of a town into the revolution.

That political will and investment appear to be there. Recently Mayor Michael Hancock reaffirmed his commitment to build 125 miles of bike lane by the end of 2023.

It’s a scene that has played out in other cities in Colorado and across the country, McLeod said.

Pockets of Boulder and Fort Collins as well as Davis, Calif., and Madison, Wis., have hit those double digits — in some cases above 20% — and ridership in the rest of the cities followed, McLeod said. Now his organization rates all four cities as platinum, the highest bicycle-friendly rating offered.

The same was true for Portland, Ore., the last platinum-ranked city on the short list and the only major urban center to achieve the rating, he said.

While certain neighborhoods spike, citywide numbers rarely reach that high, especially in major urban areas, McLeod said. For example, just 6.3% of Portland’s population commutes to work by bike, according to U.S. Census Bureau data from 2017.

The proportion of people in Madison, Fort Collins, Boulder and Davis who bike to work are 4.1%, 5.4%, 10.7% and 15.5%, respectively.

That same 2017 data set shows that 2.2% of Denver’s population commutes by bike, though van Heuven anticipates it could now be as high as 3%.

When looking at citywide numbers, McLeod said, the milestone is 3.5%. The figure comes from a Harvard study about the tipping point for the staying power of nonviolent political revolutions.

“When 3.5% of the population actively bikes to work, we might see some serious cultural change,” McLeod said.

A similar scenario played out in Washington, D.C., in recent years, with sporadic increases in bicycle ridership around the district and an investment in bike lanes — fewer than the 125 miles planned for Denver. Now 5% of the population commutes by bike, McLeod said.

“(D.C. was) able to more than double their ridership,” he said. “I don’t see any reason why Denver wouldn’t be able to do the same.”

Clearly the appetite exists in Denver, said Joe Cutrufo, spokesman for Transportation Alternatives, a New York City-based Advocacy organization.

“It’s like the fittest metro area in the country,” Cutrufo said. “People like to get outside and move their bodies.”

Cutrufo said he doesn’t focus on the percentages as much, but repeated advocates’ often-repeated mantra: “If you build it they will come.”

“We didn’t build the George Washington Bridge because there were a lot of people swimming between New York and New Jersey,” he said.

Currently, 196 miles of on-street bike lanes run through Denver, said Nancy Kuhn, spokesperson for the city’s Department of Transportation and Infrastructure.

Once the 125 miles of new bike lanes are finished, 75% of Denver’s homes will sit within a quarter-mile of “high-comfort bike facilities,” said Eulois Cleckley, the department’s executive director — or buffered and protected lanes.

That’s important for attracting new riders, Cutrufo said. Protected and buffered lanes will draw new crowds vs. regular bike lanes, which are just lines painted on streets.

“They will attract confident cyclists; they will not attract cyclists who are bike curious,” he said of unprotected bike lanes.

Meltzer agreed, saying he often feels unsafe on Denver’s streets.

“I’ve ridden in a lot of cities, and Denver streets are a bit scary as they are now,” he said.

A number of accidents in 2019 — including the deaths of a mother of two young boy and that of bike advocate Scott Hendrickson — brought renewed attention to the risks cyclists face on Denver’s streets.

Denver’s shift — and the goals set by Hancock’s administration — might be aggressive, but it’s necessary, Cleckley said.

“You can’t continue to support a growing city without having these options available,” he said.

Metlzer said he’s cautiously optimistic about the forthcoming changes.

“I just want to see action,” he said. “I want to see something built and being done. I want to hear less about it and just see it built.”

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