Santa Fe Drive & Mineral Avenue
One of Littleton's largest infrastructure projects has reached its 25% completion milestone. The city is rebuilding the Santa Fe Drive and Mineral Avenue intersection with a new quadrant roadway, a roundabout, widened lanes, updated traffic signals, drainage and utility upgrades, and improved pedestrian and cyclist connections.
The $21.4 million Mineral Avenue Intersection Improvements Project broke ground in November 2025 and is scheduled to run through fall 2027. SEMA Construction is building it, with $18.6 million funded through federal grants and developer contributions and the City of Littleton covering the remaining $2.8 million.
Partners include the Denver Regional Council of Governments, Colorado Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration, RTD, Arapahoe County, Douglas County, South Suburban Parks and Recreation, Toll Brothers, and Evergreen Devco.
The quadrant road concept, the first of its kind in the Denver metro area, removes left-turn movements from the main intersection and reroutes them onto a connector roadway in the southwest corner. That frees up green-light time for through traffic on both Santa Fe Drive and Mineral Avenue, an intersection the city says carries as many as 60,000 vehicles per day on Santa Fe and 30,000 on Mineral, with delays reaching 20 minutes during peak periods. Littleton first identified the intersection as its most congested in 2018, when the improvements project was developed.
Beyond congestion relief, the project is building the roadway infrastructure needed to support a wave of development converging on the intersection. The quadrant roadway ties directly into the future River Park development, and the broader project area includes planned redevelopment of the Equine Medical Center site, Santa Fe Park, and Aspen Grove, all positioned to add new housing and commercial density near the RTD light rail station, South Platte Park, and the Mary Carter Greenway.
Black Rock Coffee, Chipotle, Valvoline, Bubble Bath Car Wash, and the 1st Street Farms project are among the first tenants and developments planned around the rebuilt intersection.
For a corridor that has functioned largely as a traffic bottleneck for years, the roadwork underway now doubles as the foundation for Littleton's next phase of growth along the South Platte.