DENVER (KDVR) — Video from a Denver neighborhood intersection captures what residents are calling a longstanding safety issue that needs attention.
Where Perry Street meets Seventh Avenue, just feet from where children and dogs are playing, surveillance from earlier this month captures a bad crash at the intersection. It ended in severe injuries for one driver and three cars hit in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon.
“What’s crazy is that incident is just one of many,” resident Loralee Carpita said. “We’ll sit on our couch and when someone honks a horn, we flinch, literally. We’re like, oh my God, we’re going to hear it.”
In just the last year, neighbors say they’ve seen too many crashes, hit-and-run crashes and ignored stop signs to feel comfortable.
“We’ve seen a biker getting hit, a mom and a daughter getting hit,” resident Arleth Oshee said. “The most recent one, it actually hit our neighbor’s parked car and the fire department came and pulled out saws to get the woman out of the vehicle. It was a little too intense, especially at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday.”
Neighbors say they’ve put in complaints to the city to try to get help, but they are calling on the FOX31 Problem Solvers with nothing getting done.
“This neighbor petitioned two times for the city to put in a stop sign and it’s been rejected twice,” Oshee said. “I’m not sure if it’s a lack of concern or if they are not recording how many accidents there are.”
Denver responds to pleas about 7th and Perry concerns
The FOX31 Problem Solvers contacted the Denver Department of Transportation and Infrastructure, sharing these neighbors’ concerns. The department shared the following information about the plea for a four-way stop:
“We did look at this intersection recently as part of two broader initiatives that looked at travel safety in Villa Park and worked with the community to prioritize improvements.
The plan is to install a bike facility on Perry Street up to Seventh Avenue, then make Seventh Avenue a neighborhood bikeway from Perry to Tennyson, which will connect to a bike facility on Tennyson.
Installation of the bike lane on Perry will narrow the roadway for drivers and serve to reduce vehicle speeds; we’ll also add paint and posts at the corners at Seventh and Perry to narrow the roadway at that intersection, slow drivers and their turning speeds and shorten crossing distances for people walking.
Denver follows national standards in the review and installation of traffic control measures and based on those standards, the Seventh and Perry intersection is not a candidate for an all-way stop. Four-way stops are used to assign the right of way when many vehicles are moving through an intersection in both directions, and we have fairly low vehicle volumes on Seventh Ave.
That said, the safety treatments we do have planned for Seventh and Perry, and that area in general, will make a difference in how people drive along the stretch and make it better and safer for all. I don’t have an installation schedule; we are working to identify funding.”
Denver Department of Transportation and Infrastructure