Drive

by Tim Falconer

  14 Denver

  Pedestrians Wanted

  IN 1978, having just finished high school, James van Hemert and two friends rode their bicycles across Canada. First, they dipped their tires in the Pacific Ocean at Tofino, on the west coast of Vancouver Island; three months later, they dunked their wheels in the Atlantic Ocean at Halifax, Nova Scotia. Along with being a lot of fun, the adventure taught him that there’s more than one way to travel from place to place. “It opened things up for me in many ways,” said van Hemert, who grew up in a car-filled suburb of Vancouver, British Columbia. “And I realized for the very first time in my life that I can use a bicycle to get around.”

  Today, the urban planner lives about a mile from his office at Denver University and commutes by walking or biking. Ever since his sixteen-year-old Toyota Camry died in 2005 after lasting 215,000 miles, his family has happily lived with one car. His wife commutes to work in their Plymouth Voyager, and if he needs a car, he rents one. Most people equate automobiles with freedom, and the more they have, the greater the independence, but the executive director of DU’s Rocky Mountain Land Use Institute doesn’t see it that way. “Owning three cars is enslavement,” he told me, citing all the time and money needed to maintain vehicles. “If we walk or bike, we can be free. That, in fact, is more freedom than being forced to buy three cars.”

  I met with van Hemert at Kaladi Brothers Coffee, a small but comfortable café and roaster of organic and fair trade coffee near the university. The place had a bohemian charm—and Steve McQueen posters in the restroom. At 7:30 a.m., van Hemert was in his usual haunt on the right side of the café at a table beside a bookshelf. A large, round insignia with the words “Kaladi Coffee Academy” on the top and “Intellectualize, Socialize, Revolutionize” on the bottom adorned one of the red clay–coloured walls. The half-dozen or so other men at the table were middle-aged or older, except for one slightly younger man with a shaved head and a young daughter. They weren’t all professors, just an eclectic and politically diverse bunch that gathers for some lively discussion over their morning jolts of caffeine.

  When I arrived, the topic inevitably turned to cars. One member of the round-table gang, Gerry Edelstein, kept on reading his paper, but every once in a while, he would lift his head and offer his iconoclastic point of view. First, he pointed out that the car was originally an environmental solution and argued that we’d never have had our highly developed society if we were still travelling by horse, to which someone else chimed in: “But we’d never be short of fertilizer.” A few minutes later, the contrarian physicist took his eyes off The New York Times long enough to suggest that we should deplete all fossil fuels as fast as possible in order to ensure the development of alternatives: “I’d like to see a tax on all vehicles that get more than ten miles to the gallon.”

  As we moved to another table, van Hemert confided, “We’re never sure if he’s joking or not.”

  In the mid-1990s, van Hemert served as a planning director in Mississippi. He was already convinced of the wisdom of public transit, high-density development and mixed-use zoning. “But I kept my mouth shut. There was no hope. Southaven, Mississippi, is one hundred percent car culture. The only people who take a bus in that part of the country are the poor, and the bus service is rotten,” he admitted, adding that even he drove a car everywhere. “The best I could do was to ask for sidewalks. People said, ‘Why put sidewalks there? Nobody walks there.’ I’m serious, that’s what I was told. I could get sidewalks in residential areas, but not on major arterials.”

  Later, he moved to the planning department in Douglas County, Colorado, which includes Highlands Ranch, a community that became the poster child for sprawl when it made the cover of National Geographic in 1996. After he became chief planner for the county, his department had a chance to recraft some of the land use patterns. The 1979 plan for Highlands Ranch included two town centres. The first one was a dismal effort, and city hall ended up in a strip mall. When it came time to build the second one, van Hemert was determined to win a greater mix of uses, better design standards and pedestrian-oriented streets. A requirement for a minimum average height of twenty-eight feet produced a sense of enclosure and fostered more vitality; and, though it took a while, the engineering department agreed to slightly narrower streets. The town centre is not as dense as he would have liked because the developer couldn’t afford to wait until enough demand for that kind of housing emerged, but some brownstone-style townhouses went up. And the developer built a parking garage rather than relying on surface lots. “As long as you still have surface parking, you can’t create a very vibrant, immersive urban environment,” explained van Hemert. His department also attracted a library branch. Allowing a big-box Home Depot to move in was a sacrifice, but it did drive business to the other retailers, 80 percent of which aren’t chain stores.

  Despite that success, qualified as it may have been, he jumped to the Land Use Institute, an interdisciplinary forum for planning and environmental issues, in 2004. He was tired of his daily fifty-mile commute and fed up with all the shortsighted and selfish opposition that too many good ideas face from residents—or, as he calls them, the “incumbent club”—who are determined to fight anything in their backyard. “Quite frankly,” he confessed when I asked why he’d switched into academia, “I was sick of NIMBYs.”

  Dressed in a tweed sport coat over an indigo shirt, van Hemert has a long, slender face and a beard. Although calm and mild mannered, he was clearly passionate about the subject of sprawl and our need to get over the car. As he talked, he often bounced around in his seat or leaned forward with excitement. The smell of the fresh coffee beans inside the café was intoxicating and stayed with me—perhaps in my clothes and hair—for hours after I left. Many of van Hemert’s ideas stayed with me even longer.

  MY HALF-HOUR JAUNT to Kaladi had been a great way to start the day. If the old sailors’ adage held, the red sky suggested that the forecasts for a coming snowstorm would prove true, but Denver is just fifteen miles east of the foothills and I enjoyed the morning light on the Rocky Mountains as I strode west along Evans Avenue. The people of Colorado are proud that they live in the thinnest state in the nation, but self-selection has a lot to do with it since skiers, mountain bikers and other active people move here for the recreational opportunities. That’s one reason the metropolitan area now has a population of more than 2.3 million.

  But the geography has its downside: even the city government’s website admits, “To tackle long distances and tough terrain, Coloradoans have become auto-dependent.” With one car for every man, woman and child, Denver’s ownership rate is one of the highest in the country. In the 1990s, an outer ring of new freeways immediately became clogged, and even after the Regional Transportation District (RTD) started building a light rail system, highway congestion remained the top complaint for many residents. So while the region is booming, most of the growth has been of the car-fuelled variety; even Denver proper— population: 575,000—has a density under 3,700 people per square mile.

  It’s a problem van Hemert spends a lot of time thinking about. During the summer, he and two law professors co-wrote an op-ed piece for the Denver Post that questioned whether Mayor John Hickenlooper’s “Greenprint Denver” plan—which aims to cut greenhouse gas emissions, increase tree cover and promote recycling—was green enough. Instead of advocating feel-good measures, the authors argued, the mayor needed to get serious: “A city in which more people live closer to where they work and shop is a cleaner city (less air pollution from vehicles), a more efficient city (less fuel consumption), and a healthier city (more people bike or walk). If you commute 50 miles every day by car (even with a hybrid), no quantity of reusable shopping bags is going to balance out the pollution you emit and the fuel you consume.”

  The piece didn’t get much of a reaction from the round-table gang—which disappointed van Hemert—but a few days later, Vincent Carroll, the editorial page editor at the rival Rocky Mountain News, resp
onded with a column that took particular umbrage at this line: “We will be happier, healthier, richer, more efficient and more environmentally friendly if there are more of us per square mile.” He blustered that “a more dubious claim can hardly be imagined,” but his rebuttal was unconvincing. In response to the suggestion that a denser city is a more efficient one, Carroll wrote, “The claim that low-density housing wastes resources on roads, utilities and public services such as trash pickup has been around since at least 1973 when the Council on Environmental Quality released a report titled ‘The Costs of Sprawl.’ But this conclusion remains a matter of debate, and many serious scholars have taken issue with it over the years.” This is a classic tactic for conservatives: dismiss as junk science any research that challenges their reactionary ideology. But the most depressing aspect of Carroll’s libertarian argument was that it reinforced the misconception—far too common in far too many places—that living “cheek-by-jowl with our neighbours” is unpleasant.

  High density doesn’t have to mean run-down tenements or living on the twenty-fifth floor in a city that never sleeps. True, New York City isn’t for everyone; indeed, while some people wish they lived in SoHo or the Upper East Side, many more couldn’t imagine a worse fate. And plenty of long-time Manhattan residents eventually make the move to New Jersey or Connecticut after tiring of the noise, the traffic and the yardless lifestyle. Still, van Hemert calls Manhattan the greenest place in America. “If you live in the bucolic countryside on five acres, you need three cars to survive. You have a huge house so you’re burning up a lot more fossil fuel and you acquire more stuff,” he argued. “There’s nothing very green about it when you look at your ecological footprint and the amount you’re contributing to climate change.”

  Mid-rise buildings as low as five stories offer an effective and comforting alternative to intimidating towers, and even neighbourhoods filled with single-family houses don’t have to take up so much land. “We love single-family homes in America,” said van Hemert. “But if we narrow our streets a little bit and are more clever about how we arrange things, we can still have high density.” Along with a greater concentration of units—in California, for example, some developers are building ten to twelve homes to the acre—he’d like to see more basement suites, granny flats, coach houses and apartments over garages. They provide affordable housing for those who need it and income for homeowners. By discouraging these dwellings, cities such as Denver are encouraging sprawl; fortunately, more and more residents are adding units anyway.

  Even bigger change is likely to come with Denver’s aggressive transit expansion. Americans don’t often vote for more taxes and, true to form, the residents of the region defeated a 1997 proposal to pay for expanded public transit by boosting the sales tax. But advocacy groups, the business community, governments and some citizens worked tirelessly toward a second vote, and in 2004 the idea passed. Funded by the 0.4 percent increase in the sales tax as well as federal and other money, FasTracks is a twelve-year, $4.7-billion plan that will give the region 119 miles of new light rail and commuter train service and 18 miles of bus rapid transit. Knowing that the existing light rail service, though limited, had exceeded ridership expectations from the first day, cities in the region quickly fought for stations and to get their line built first.

  A few weeks after I met with van Hemert, the new nineteenmile Southeast Corridor light rail line opened as part of project called T-REX (from Transportation Expansion), which included additional lanes and other improvements to Interstate 25. The infrastructure investment was one reason van Hemert, who knows people who have sold their homes and bought places within walking distance of new stations, thinks sprawl can be conquered in Denver. “There’s a strong link between transportation and land use. If all you build are freeways and six-lane arterials, all you get are single-family homes spread all the way to Kansas,” he argued, adding that the new line will make a huge difference. “Around the stations, you’re already seeing changes in the land use pattern and you’re seeing changes in the way properties are marketed.”

  Not that he didn’t have some reservations. For one thing, density follows transit only if zoning allows it. But around some stations, the rules have stayed the same because either the planners couldn’t decide what to do or neighbours opposed any changes. “It’s a huge waste to have a station that serves single-family residential and a few strip centres,” he said. “But as you go farther south, where there was more opportunity, you’re seeing some very high-density development that has already been constructed in anticipation of the light rail lines.” The planning community tends to prefer higher densities, more mixed use and a richer array of amenities, but neighbourhoods don’t want change, so battles between progressive planners and reactionary residents are hard to avoid. It’s not just that people in single-family homes oppose out-of-scale apartment towers going up right next door—that might be understandable—but those in three-hundred-thousand-dollar houses fight proposals for two-hundred-thousand-dollar houses. That’s making developers and planners strange bedfellows. “The market will generally want more density and mixed use,” noted van Hemert, “so actually I often feel more comfortable speaking with developers and real estate professionals than the incumbent club.”

  Parking never fails to rile up the incumbents. Because it’s a problem at some existing stations, the FasTrack plan calls for twenty-one thousand new spots, and all but one of thirteen stations on the new line offer free parking. “Even though we’re building all this light rail, it’s completely car dominated,” he said. “We want more people to walk, but people are not getting out of their cars, they’re driving to the stations, and light rail is just a convenient way to save on the hassle of parking downtown.” When people living near the stations complain that they don’t want other people’s cars on their streets, the local politicians listen. “We shouldn’t be counting on parking garages,” argued van Hemert. “We should be counting on people coming by bike, by foot and by bus.”

  Enticing people onto buses, which bear the stigma of secondclass transportation, is a challenge throughout North America, especially in the West. People who’ll happily ride subways or streetcars shy away from buses even though they’re cheaper to put on the road and more flexible because one breakdown doesn’t snarl the whole system. Van Hemert’s wife, who is originally from Montana, has never taken a bus in Denver. “She’s a Western girl who loves her car,” he said. But the city doesn’t have the density— or the money—to build light rail for everyone, so people will have to learn to love, or at least not hate, the bus. Dedicated lanes will help drivers see the advantages of the bus; so will better stops. Too many are now in uninviting spots without shelters or benches— or even, in some cases, sidewalks. “That’s the next step to making transit work in this city—making the bus-riding experience more acceptable to get people out of their cars.”

  Looking even farther into the future, van Hemert believes Denver will be the centre of an emerging Front Range megalopolis. Running from Cheyenne, Wyoming, down to Albuquerque, New Mexico, it could be home to more than 8.3 million people by 2035, an increase of more than 50 percent from the current population. “If that’s going to be a sustainable, dynamic, economically competitive region—like a Los Angeles or a Boston to Washington corridor—we need to be linked by rail,” argued van Hemert, who is the co-author of True West: Authentic Development Patterns for Small Towns and Rural Areas, a 2003 book that among other topics looks at car dependency in the West. In the short term, high-speed inter-city rail is a more expensive solution than highway expansion, but it’s better for the environment, more likely to foster compact, mixed-use communities and be cheaper in the long run.

  The region must also contend with a limited water supply. Since it’s west of the hundredth meridian, Denver averages less than sixteen inches of precipitation a year, and some of the surrounding area doesn’t receive even that much. Already large lots are becoming increasingly scarce as suburbs balk at t
he cost of delivering water to far-flung residents while developers are finding it cheaper and less hassle to build in the city, which already has the infrastructure in place.

  Beyond the desire to conserve water, remain economically competitive and create more livable, healthier and ecological communities, van Hemert sees sprawl as a social justice issue. Since the country has more cars than drivers, it’s easy to forget that nearly a third of Americans—including anyone too old or too young to drive, the handicapped and those who can’t afford a car—don’t drive. The Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath owned a truck during the Depression, but gas was cheap, parking was free and they didn’t have to pay for insurance. A car is a much more expensive proposition today. Most of the people trapped in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina didn’t have a way to get out of town; they didn’t have a car. And with our aging population, more and more people won’t be able to drive because of failing eyesight, senility or other medical problems. “I don’t think it’s appropriate for us to be building communities where the only way to live an active, successful lifestyle is by owning two or three cars.”

  After some prodding, van Hemert gave Denver an average grade on coping with the car. Like most other cities, it’s still planning and building for the automobile, but attitudes are changing. When he and his family arrived a decade ago, there were only a few miles of light rail and people said, “This city will never go on the train. We are in the West, we love our cars and we have lots of space.” That wasn’t true. Even though he knows some drivers voted to fund transit with a tax increase only because they hoped others would use the train, leaving more room on the roads, light rail ridership has exceeded all projections. And he’s heartened to see condos going up downtown and even around his university. The battle isn’t over, but he likes the trends. “We have to make it a little bit more difficult to use the car, we have to make the place attractive and we have to make walking and biking the obvious ways to get around,” he told me. “Really, what we’re looking at is a paradigm shift in society, and it’s happening here in Denver, but it’s going to take time.”