Denver tries to mitigate its automobile dependence

Over the last thirty or so years, most of the urban areas of the Mountain West and Sunbelt have been taking some tentative steps to mitigate the less attractive aspects of their dependence on automobiles. They’ve built hiking and biking trails; they’ve encouraged and even subsidized downtown redevelopment; they’ve worked to create walkable neighborhoods; and they’ve added rail transit lines. The statistics suggest that none has succeeded to any great extent. The percentage of people using automobiles to commute to work has barely budged, and most downtowns are still not very healthy. But some urban areas have done better than others. It’s arguable that, among big cities, Denver has come a little closer to succeeding than its competitors.

Denver is in many ways typical of urban places in the country’s Mountain States and South. It’s big and it’s been growing quickly. The urban area has a population of something like three million, up approximately 15% from ten years earlier, and it sprawls enormously. While the boundaries of urban areas in the United States are always vague, continuous settlement in the Denver area runs at least sixty miles (100 km) north-south along the Front Range and at least thirty miles (50 km) east-west, from high up in the Rockies to far out in the Great Plains. Most travel in this huge region is by automobile. Very little of the Denver area would be considered “walkable” by any measure. And there’s a tremendous pollution problem.

As it happens, I’ve been in Denver at least every few years since the 1980s, and I went through a period in the early 1990s when I was there several times a year. I feel I know at least the central city moderately well and have a good sense of how the place has changed. I recently spent a few days in Denver and made an effort to take a close look at some of the ways that the Denver area has changed since I started visiting regularly.

From the perhaps peculiar point-of-view of this blog, Denver’s greatest claim to fame may be that it has such a complete network of off-street recreational paths. There are at least 250 miles (400 km) of such paths in the Denver area, and the major components of the system intersect with each other in a complicated enough way as to constitute a kind of network.

Map of the Denver area showing rail-transit lines and pedestrian and bicycle facilities. GIS data are mostly from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap, modified.

Most of the basic trail network dates from at least the 1980s. I say “at least” because the parks through which most of the trails run date back much further, in some cases to something like the 1890s (and perhaps beyond). These parks were established as Denverites discovered that the smallish streams flowing through the city out of the nearby Rockies could flood during spring thaws and after summer thunderstorms. Areas along the streams were gradually turned into parkland, and the streams themselves were tamed to some degree. Numerous dams were built, and, in some cases, streambeds were made less irregular and acquired concrete walls.

Cherry Creek Trail, which runs in a culvert along the edge of downtown Denver.

Paths through the linear parks along the streams naturally followed, sometimes as a result of work by government agencies, sometimes just because people liked to walk in the parks and eventually eroded pathways. In the 1980s, as more and more people took up bicycling, running, and walking, governments turned these paths into formal “bicycle trails,” and that’s what they’re still usually called, although they’re used by plenty of pedestrians. Since the 1980s these paths have slowly been improved in many small ways. They’ve mostly been paved. They’ve acquired stripes and mileage markers.

Mileage marker along Cherry Creek Trail, near its junction with High Line Canal Trail.

Gaps have been filled in. New side trails have been added. Bicycle and pedestrian traffic has been separated on the lower mile or so of Cherry Creek Trail, where there are paths on both sides of the creek.

Signs asking that cyclists shift to the other side of Cherry Creek Trail.

And Cherry Creek Trail now ends at Confluence Park, which was built in part to celebrate the new millennium. Confluence Park incorporates the cleaned-up junction of Cherry Creek and the South Platte River and, with neighboring Commons Park, it provides impressive views of Denver’s renovated inner city.

I certainly wouldn’t claim that Denver’s bicycle trails are perfect. Because the trails follow streams that settlers avoided, they don’t always go where people might have found them most useful (but the two main trails, along Cherry Creek and the South Platte River, do both pass along the edge of downtown). Another problem: In a few places, busy freeways, also built away from settlements, abut the trails.

Along the South Platte River Trail perhaps 3.2 miles (5 km) south of downtown Denver.

In addition, on pleasant weekend afternoons there can be so many cyclists that it’s hard to walk on the trails. Also, in at least one place a couple of miles from downtown, where the Denver Country Club insisted on controlling the banks of Cherry Creek, the Cherry Creek Trail is forced to divert onto a narrow sidewalk segment along a busy arterial. Of course, the sheer crowdedness of this narrow and unappealing segment is a sign of the trails’ success in attracting users.

Other cities have been building recreational paths too, but Denver, thanks to its geography, established them earlier than most cities, and it still has more of them for its size than just about any other U.S. urban area with the likely exception of Washington. Its competitors in the Mountain West and Sunbelt are far behind. Atlanta has struggled for decades to build its single long recreational trail, the Beltway. Dallas is only now trying to connect its scattered trails. Houston is just beginning to construct paths along its bayous. Austin’s excellent trail network is minute compared to Denver’s. New Orleans has had a hard time connecting its riverside levees near its central business district. And Phoenix has done little to join its dispersed trails, although it does have plans to do so.

Denver’s comparative success in building bicycle trails has increased the number of bicycle commuters only a little according to the Census Bureau’s 2015/2019 statistics on commuting to work by those aged 16 and over.¹ Only 2.2% of the city of Denver’s commuters got to work by bicycle while the comparable figure for the Denver-Aurora urban area was 0.9%. Several American cities (mostly but not all college towns) did better.² But, with the exception of New Orleans, most big Sunbelt and Mountain West cities and urban areas did much worse. Here are some city and urban area figures: Atlanta 1.1% and 0.2%; Dallas 0.2% and 0.1%; Houston 0.4% and 0.2%; New Orleans 3.1% and 1.4%; Phoenix 0.6% and 0.8%.

Maps of central Denver showing (1) percent of households carfree and (2) modal split of journeys to work, 2015/2019. Data are from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Map on left is comparable to the carfree maps in the preceding post.

Denver has also been more successful than its competitors at reviving its downtown. In the early 1980s, Denver’s CBD, stretching something like 2 km (1.3 miles) between Union Station and the State Capitol, had all the usual problems of American downtowns. Its department stores were on their last legs. The inhabitants of close-in neighborhoods tended to be poor. There was a sense that downtown Denver wasn’t quite safe. It’s possible that the establishment of the 16th Street Mall in 1982 was a key catalyst for change. The sidewalks and the roadway along 16th Street were paved with ornamental tile. A system of free mall buses was instituted, and these buses have been the only vehicles allowed along most of 16th Street for virtually all the time since then. Even during the Pandemic, they’ve been running every couple of minutes. There may be no more frequent bus service in the United States.

The 16th Street Mall, Denver.

There were periods as retailers closed and parking lots spread along 16th Street when the Mall seemed threatened, but restaurants have always done an adequate business. The addition of a nearby baseball stadium (1995) and several performance venues helped enormously. These days, despite the continued scarcity of office workers and tourists because of the Pandemic, downtown Denver is certainly the liveliest big-city downtown between Chicago and San Francisco.

Map of central Denver, showing roads, rail-transit lines, and bicycling and pedestrian facilities. GIS data are mostly from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap, modified.

A factor in the success of downtown Denver is that inner-city Denver has come to be seen as an attractive place to live. Capitol Hill, the neighborhood just to the south and east of the State Capitol, began to gentrify as early as the 1950s. In the 1980s it was a congenial, vaguely bohemian place, and, actually, it still is despite continued slow gentrification.

Older house, Capitol Hill.

The next neighborhood out, Cheesman Park, east of Capitol Hill, seems actually to have never had any problems at all; it’s always been a prosperous place, and, with its apartment buildings (including a few high rises) a surprisingly urban one.

Cheesman Park. apartment buildings, on Cheesman Park, the park.

Although automobile ownership in these neighborhoods is high and the sidewalks are not exactly crowded, Capitol Hill and Cheesman Park are some of the only residential neighborhoods in the Mountain West and Sunbelt where I’ve had a considerable amount of company as I walked about.

A little more startling: the once rather gritty northern half of downtown Denver has also become a prestigious residential area, “LoDo” (or, more formally, Lower Downtown). A few old warehouses and industrial buildings were converted into hotels in the 1980s, some others (generally a bit later) into apartment buildings. New apartment buildings (some very tall) have been added to the mix in the years since. And, at the north end of 16th Street, three elegant pedestrian bridges over active railroad tracks, the South Platte River, and Interstate 25 stimulated the creation of additional housing in the early 21st century, partly built from scratch and partly as a result of renovations.

Millennium Bridge, which takes pedestrians over railroad tracks in LoDo. An elevator is available for the handicapped and those with baggage or a bicycle.

View of Highland, north across Commons Park, from Millennium Bridge. Photo shows the two bridges north of Millennium Bridge, one over the South Platte River and one over I-25.

The formerly grim areas north of Union Station and between the South Platte and I-25 are now high-prestige, walkable residential areas. These areas are not only walkable; unlike some theoretically “walkable” areas in American cities, they actually have quite a few pedestrians. In how many other places in North America has a clever (and modestly priced) city planning project created a successful new urban place?

New housing between the South Platte River and I-25.

Gentrification has not been limited to the neighborhoods mentioned above. It’s also spread into Five Points and North Capitol Hill, where, I acknowledge, there has probably been a certain amount of slow displacement. It’s a little hard to see how this could have been avoided. Much further out, Central Park, a very large neighborhood that’s been built where the old Stapleton Airport was, has theoretically been planned on the basis of “new urbanist” principles, although it looks to me to consist almost entirely of single-family homes on wide streets, and its sidewalks are pretty empty. At least it does have sidewalks (a great deal of outer and suburban Denver doesn’t).

Most of Denver’s competitors have also tried to encourage the construction of housing in and near their central business districts, and some have had some success. Austin now has the tallest residential buildings west of the Mississippi; Atlanta’s downtown and Midtown have numerous new or newish middle-class apartment buildings too; and Dallas has tried to turn its downtown and several nearby neighborhoods into walkable places. But—and I acknowledge that this isn’t the only criterion that should be applied—none of these other cities has managed to create places that attract anything like as many pedestrians as Denver’s LoDo. And, with the spectacular exception of many parts of New Orleans, no other older gentrified neighborhood in the Mountain States or South has retained as much late 19th- and early 20th-century housing as Denver’s Capitol Hill.

Denver has also added more than its share of rail transit, and it’s done so with the help of locally raised taxes under the FasTracks program. Starting in 1994, it opened several light-rail lines. Electrified suburban rail lines were added starting in 2016; the line to the airport, which operates every fifteen minutes during the day, arguably provides better service than any suburban railroad in North America. The rail lines reach out along eight corridors from downtown; there’s also a line through central Aurora that avoids downtown completely.

The Florida station on Denver’s H and R lines, which mostly run along freeways through Denver’s eastern suburbs. It’s hard to imagine that many customers walk to stations like this.

The light-rail lines were mostly built in places where they were relatively cheap to build—along rail or freeway rights-of-way—and it’s arguable that, as a consequence, they don’t go where they would have been most useful (the inner city lost out most dramatically), but, as elsewhere in the United States, funding to build the lines was not very generous.  Denver’s lines did get built, and a couple of light-rail extensions and an additional railroad line or two are planned.

Like new rail lines elsewhere in the Mountain States and Sunbelt, Denver’s lines have not attracted as many riders as their builders had expected, but at least Denver has done a little better than most of its competitors. Pre-Pandemic, Denver’s light-rail lines had somewhat under 100,000 riders a day, its suburban lines just under 30,000, in other words, approximately as many light-rail riders as Dallas’s much longer system and far more suburban-rail riders than in Dallas. According to the Census Bureau, 4.4% of the Denver-Aurora urbanized area’s workers 16 and over took public transit to work in the 2015/2019 period. The comparable figure for the city of Denver was 7.6%. These numbers would seem pretty pitiful for any European urban area, and even for American cities in the Northeast and on the West Coast, but they’re actually high for the Mountain West and Sunbelt. Comparable figures for Dallas, for example, were 1.3 and 3.5; for Houston 2.0 and 3.8; for New Orleans 3.3 and 6.8; and for Phoenix 1.8 and 2.9 (but the city of Atlanta, with its heavy-rail lines, beat the city Denver; its figures were 2.8 and 10.0).

It’s impossible to be sure of why Denver has become a slightly less automobile-oriented place than its competitors, but it seems worthwhile to speculate. Size could have something to do with it. Denver is smaller (and perhaps more manageable?) than Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, and Phoenix, but it’s larger than Albuquerque, Austin, New Orleans, and Salt Lake. Denver also has the advantage of having been a reasonably big place earlier than most of its competitors (exception: New Orleans).³ Thus, it had a great many more preservable late 19th-/early 20th-century buildings in neighborhoods around downtown than its competitors. This probably helped make gentrification both easier and more gentle (Dallas’ attempt to build walkable neighborhoods involved bulldozing some of the old ones). In addition, Denver’s network of watercourses provided a relatively easy opportunity to build recreational trails. The fact that Denver rarely gets extraordinarily hot and/or humid in the summer may be an advantage too (but it can also get bitterly cold in the winter). Denver has on the whole probably attracted a larger proportion of highly educated, younger people than most of its competitors (but surely not more than Austin). These immigrants may have pushed governments to make positive decisions about building, for example, recreational paths and public transportation; governments in, say, the Houston or Phoenix regions have probably faced much less pressure in this area. Something else that has made Denver different is that Colorado’s government, unlike the state governments in most other Mountain West and Sunbelt states, has often been in the hands of Democrats, who have generally been more likely than Republicans to vote to contribute to non-automotive infrastructure projects.

Denver, like other urban areas of the Mountain West and Sunbelt, remains for the most part a sprawling, automobile-oriented, and energy-inefficient place. But it really has managed in some small ways to reduce some of the more disagreeable aspects of automobile dependence. As a result, you could probably live a little more comfortably without a car (or with very little car-use) in central Denver than in the central parts of, say, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, or Phoenix. This isn’t, I acknowledge. saying much.