DENVER — Denver’s Fire Department has issued a temporary moratorium on approvals for neighborhood traffic circles, worried the newly constructed intersections may interfere with their ability to maneuver their large trucks.
The decision comes as neighbors along the 7th Avenue bikeway through the Congress Park neighborhood have complained to the city about the new infrastructure.
Denver’s Department of Transportation and Infrastructure (DOTI) said it will continue to work with Denver Fire to improve the so-called mini-circles, which were installed as safety measures to slow traffic down and make streets safer for cyclists and pedestrians.
A spokeswoman for DOTI noted that each of the 36 mini circles the city has installed were reviewed and approved by a Denver Fire Department plan analyst. She also noted DOTI uses a fire truck as a control vehicle for design in all safety road improvements.
Traffic engineers say these treatments of neighborhood streets reduce crashes by making intersections safer. Dan Burden is an engineer with Blue Zones, which helps design safety improvements for neighborhood streets across the country. He said that in Seattle, where nearly 3,000 of these mini-circles have been installed, crashes were reduced by 98%.
Burden said the change at intersections should actually improve traffic flow making it easier for fire trucks and other emergency vehicles to respond to scenes more quickly.
“A four-way stop is really going to bring the emergency responder to a dead halt,” Burden said. “It has to by law.”
“In a mini circle, they have to slow down to where they can see, but it’s a yield condition and they’re coming in code 3 (with lights and siren) so they can see and they never need to stop so it’s an improvement in their response time.”
Wes Marshall, a University of Colorado Denver traffic engineering professor, said circles are designed so fire trucks can drive over a curb to make tight turns and in most cases trucks are allowed to make a left hand turn across the circle.
“Most of them will have a mountable apron and even all the ones I’ve seen around Denver it wouldn’t be hard for a fire truck to mount over the traffic circle and get where they’re going,” he said.
Both Marshall and Burden noted that fire crews continue to respond to more and more crash scenes, so the adapted intersections help by reducing those crashes.
“We are in regular conversations with DOTI as we look into both what is good for the citizens of Denver as well as ensuring emergency vehicles can navigate to any location we are needed to respond,” said JD Chism, the public information officer for the Denver Fire Department.
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