A monthslong battle over vehicle access to an upscale south Denver suburb has turned into all-out war.
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Bow Mar, a leafy community with homes on acre lots wedged between Denver and Littleton, made it clear this week that it is moving ahead with plans to build a gate at its northern entrance on South Sheridan Boulevard that will allow only town residents to pass in and out using remote openers.
Meanwhile, officials from Denver and Littleton have fired back with threats of erecting their own barriers to impede Bow Mar denizens from moving freely into their jurisdictions, calling the tiny town’s proposed gate an insular and unreasonable way to try to slow drivers on its gently winding streets, which feature neither street lights nor sidewalks.
Bow Mar Mayor Bryan Sperry was determined not to back down as he addressed a packed Board of Trustees meeting Monday evening. In the back of the room, residents held up signs that read “Protect Bow Mar Kids” and “Families Over Shortcuts.”
“This is about safety — this is not about excluding others,” the mayor said.
Sperry held up oversized photos of the aftermath of recent vehicle collisions with walls and other structures in Bow Mar — vivid examples of motorists using the quiet community of 900 as a high-speed cut-through on their way to somewhere else.
“Thankfully, this was not kid versus car,” said Sperry, holding up a photo of stones from a smashed wall strewn across the ground.
But Denver City Councilman Kevin Flynn, who represents the southwest pocket of Colorado’s largest city near Fort Logan National Cemetery, isn’t buying it.
“They’re trying to privatize access only to the residents of Bow Mar by installing a gate that only their residents can raise,” said Flynn, noting that Denver’s city line abuts Bow Mar’s entrance sign. “We can’t have our public right of way being turned into your private driveway.”
Residents in two neighborhoods he represents — Bow Mar Heights and Pinehurst South — would be forced to take dangerous left turns onto West Quincy Avenue if denied the signal at South Sheridan Boulevard.
Ninety people, he said, showed up “enraged” at a community meeting in May to speak about the gate.
In turn, Denver will look into whether it should drop a barricade across South Sheridan Boulevard just north of Bow Mar’s entrance so that nobody — including Bow Mar residents — can move through, he said.
“I hope it doesn’t come to that, but it is definitely one of the measures we could take if this is not resolved,” Flynn said.
Littleton Mayor Kyle Schlachter said his city is considering whether it’s time to cut off access into Bow Mar from West Belleview Avenue.
“Closing access to a certain group of individuals does not seem fair or equitable to me,” he said of Bow Mar’s proposed gate on Sheridan. “It’s a public street and our residents use that to get to where they are headed.”
Limiting access into a community has happened before in Colorado, with the small Arapahoe County town of Foxfield erecting two gates several years ago to reduce the volume of traffic cutting through the town from Parker Road.
But Flynn pointed out that Foxfield’s gates only operate during morning and evening rush hours, whereas Bow Mar’s gate would be an around-the-clock affair.
“We cannot allow a public right of way to be used like that,” he said. “They’re changing the status of our right-of-way.”
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Bow Mar residents say nothing else the town has tried over the years to slow drivers has worked — be it speed bumps, roundabouts, narrowing the roads with striping, or imposing a 20 mph maximum speed throughout town.
“We’ve tried everything,” Charli White, a 3-year resident of Bow Mar, told the trustees this week. “It still feels like it’s not safe.”
Bow Mar said it issued 294 traffic citations last year, including 127 speeding tickets and 49 traffic arrests. There were three DUI arrests in 2025.
Through April this year, the town has stopped 117 drivers, with 45 speeding tickets issued and 15 traffic arrests made. Two of those drivers were suspected of being drunk.
Rob Sterling, who has lived in Bow Mar for 11 years, told The Denver Post in an interview that a car smashed into his mailbox last year and left a piece of fender in his driveway.
“In 10 years, I have had 14 cars end up in the drainage ditch in front of my house,” he said. “All they think about is getting to where they are going. They don’t realize there are kids on bikes and people trying to do the speed limit — those things just get in their way.”
There are no commercial businesses in Bow Mar — just homes. The gate at Sheridan, which could be in operation by the end of the year, would be accessible to emergency crews and delivery services, town officials said.
Bow Mar Trustee Liz Manning said those claiming that the town is trying to wall itself off from its neighbors are ignoring the fact that there are no plans by Bow Mar to control access at West Berry and West Belleview avenues.
“We are putting a controlled access gate at Sheridan and at no other entrance,” she said. “Our traffic data show that by far the highest volume of cut-through traffic goes through Sheridan.”
Manning also pointed out that while Littleton complains about Bow Mar’s plans for a gate, the city has had its own gate at the entrance to Bow Mar South, a Littleton neighborhood, for years.
“I’ve heard that Littleton’s position is: A gate for me and not for thee,” she said wryly.
Schlachter said he recognizes the mixed messaging of Littleton having its own gate in place to restrict traffic into a city neighborhood while opposing Bow Mar’s plans. He said he’d like to see the gate, which is not closed all the time, gone.
“It’s something I will ask city staff to explore removal of,” he said. “I have never liked that gate there.”
In the meantime, Barclay Miller, a Bow Mar resident for 3 years, is concerned that with plans for hundreds more housing units to be added to neighborhoods surrounding Bow Mar, the problem of cut-through traffic is only going to get worse if the town doesn’t protect itself.
“We don’t want a tragedy to happen for us to take action,” he said at the trustees meeting.
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