

New bike lanes, along with shared bikes and scooters, offer even more non-vehicular options for people living in or near downtown.
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Parking lots and low-density industrial lots have been turned into apartments and condos, offering easy access to regional rail, the free buses running on 16 th, 18 th and 19 th streets, as well as other bus and light rail service throughout the city. Many recent new developments downtown have been built on areas that were already paved. Land devoted to parking in downtown Denver, as of 2016. (The city’s parking lots have even earned notoriety nationally, “winning” Streetsblog USA’s annual Parking Madness Tournament in 2017 for the vast expanse of parking surrounding Pepsi Center in downtown.) To put all that parking pavement in perspective, here is a visualization of the land we’ve devoted to parking in downtown Denver. Space just for parking cars accounts for nearly a quarter of all of Denver’s paved areas. Of the 37,800 acres of land in Denver that is impervious (covered in pavement or buildings), 60 percent is infrastructure to support cars, according to data presented by the Post. Data from Denver Regional Council of Governments, via the Denver Post. It’s the roads, driveways and – perhaps most egregiously – the parking lots we’ve built to accommodate more cars. The primary threat to green space in and around Denver is not skyscrapers going up in downtown or apartments constructed to accommodate new people. It’s because of a growing population of cars. The city’s pavement problem isn’t because of a growing population of people. There’s something important missing in the Post’s account of Denver’s growth, however. The article posits that “Denver’s elected leaders and developers over the past 20 years drove this shift toward high-rise towers, yard-devouring duplexes and shopping plazas,” replacing green space with “an increasingly dense format that has enabled population growth.” As one article notes, replacing green space with pavement increases runoff, since stormwater cannot filter into the ground and instead flows directly into local rivers and ponds, bringing pollutants with it and increasing the risk of flooding.
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But it raises a difficult question: If hundreds of thousands of people flock to a place because of its access to nature, how do you preserve the natural beauty that brought them there in the first place?Ī recent Denver Post series raised some of these questions, arguing that development in Denver has paved over green space so that “nearly half the land in Denver’s city limits is now paved or built over,” (excluding undeveloped land around the airport). People are drawn here from around the country by the quality of life, proximity to the mountains and 300 days of sunshine a year. No concern trolling, gaslighting, misinformation, brigading.Alana Miller, a policy analyst at the Frontier Group, wrote this guest commentary.ĭenver is one of the nation’s fastest growing cities.


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