Streetsblog Capitol Hill

The above photo is downtown Denver in 1976.

Not pretty is it? But Denver doesn’t look like that anymore. And that’s no accident.

Even though that picture is what inspired Streetsblog’s Parking Madness competition, Denver didn’t even make it past the first round in our hunt for the worst parking crater in an American downtown.

This is what this part of Denver looks like today:

In the 1990s, in response to the creeping cancer of surface parking, the Mile High City took action. The city changed its downtown zoning to eliminate surface parking as a use by right. So if you owned a building, you were welcome to tear it down, but you couldn’t park cars on the lot. All existing parking lots were grandfathered in.

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In the race to the bottom that is Parking Madness, Streetsblog’s Sweet 16-style tournament of terrible downtown parking craters, 10 cities have faced off so far.

But there are more, so many more awful parking wastelands in otherwise proud American cities. In this post, the match up is Atlanta versus Denver. Remember to cast your votes at the bottom.

Let’s start with Atlanta:

The most shameful thing about this asphalt field is that a MARTA rail station is smack dab in the middle of it. So much for transit-oriented development, huh? Atlanta transit advocate Ashley Robbins sent us this description:

One MARTA stop south of Five Points, the downtown epicenter of Atlanta, stands the Garnett station in a sea of underutilized parking. The Garnett plaza garden over the heavy rail and Greyhound stations, while being near the federal building, the Atlanta Municipal court, and the popular Castleberry Hill neighborhood, is surrounded with unkempt parking, abandoned buildings and is known for lurid activity, giving Garnett one of the worst reputations of any MARTA station.

There’s nothing quite as threatening as a darkened parking lot at night.

Meanwhile, on to Denver. Commenter Jack Shaner sent us this aerial photo of the northern edge of downtown in the Mile High City, in which you can see a collection of craters:

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Alright, Streetsblog readers. Send us your best shots.

After running our “worst intersection in America” photo contest, we heard from readers who want to see “more public shaming” of terrible transportation and planning blunders around the country. We aim to please. So here is the next contest: Where is the worst sea of downtown surface parking in America?

We’re looking for aerial photos, and once we’ve got a sizable sample, we’ll put it up for a vote. The competition should be fierce.

We’ve already held Cleveland’s formidable Warehouse District up to the spotlight:

Is this as bad as it gets? First we need submissions from our readers. Then it will be up to you guys to decide.

Send your entries to Angie [at] streetsblog.org or tweet us at @streetsblogNET. Let the race to the bottom begin.

Earlier this week, Denver’s B-Cycle bike-share system came under fire for allegedly side-stepping low-income neighborhoods. The accuser was City Council Member Paul Lopez, and his complaint was not something that system operators necessarily deny: There aren’t many stations in low-income neighborhoods.

The broader claim — that bike-share isn’t serving the populations that might benefit most from it — has dogged nearly every system in the country. And at its core there is some truth: American bike-share systems aren’t doing a good job reaching low-income and minority populations, according to a recent FHWA report.

Only 1 percent of Boston Hubway users are black. In Washington, DC, only 3 percent of Capital Bikeshare users are African-American, according to CaBi’s annual survey [PDF]. Denver’s B-Cycle users are 81 percent white and only 21 percent have annual household incomes of less than $50,000, according to the Denver Post.

These are statistics that bike-share cities are painfully aware of. And every locale has adopted different methods to reach disadvantaged groups. Denver and Boulder work with the local housing authorities to make memberships available to residents of public housing. Hubway offers subsidized memberships to anyone with an income less than 400 percent of the poverty rate. Minneapolis’s Nice Ride requires no deposit to be held on the user’s credit card.

But with many of these programs, success has been limited. One issue is siting — that was the point raised by Council Member Lopez in Denver. B-Cycle has only one station in west Denver, where much of the city’s Hispanic population resides. ”That truly says something,” he told the Post.

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As more cities look to revive or expand their transit networks in the face of rising gas prices and maddening congestion, planners have had to remain vigilant to ensure that underprivileged communities are not displaced or adversely affected by the same transit improvements that could offer them numerous benefits.

A few different techniques have emerged that could assist planners and policymakers in making sure the benefits of transit are equitably distributed. Just last January, for instance, Streetsblog reported on the Health Impact Assessment for St. Paul, Minnesota’s Central Corridor, which analyzed how a proposed light rail line could better serve disadvantaged areas along the route from a public health standpoint.

Last month in Denver, the national nonprofit Reconnecting America debuted the Regional Equity Atlas, a geographic encyclopedia of the Mile High City’s ambitious long-range transit plans – known collectively as FasTracks — and the anticipated effects on surrounding communities. The report, a project of the Mile High Connects coalition, is a visual compendium of how the proposed transit expansions will affect not just health but housing, education, and economic development in greater Denver.

“It should be immensely useful not only to city officials, advocates, planners and social scientists in Denver, but also to anyone looking for a state-of-the-art analytical model to assist the coordination of transportation, housing, jobs, and access to important services in other American cities,” Kaid Benfield, director of sustainable communities for the Natural Resources Defense Council, wrote last week. “It must have cost a fortune to underwrite.”

The impetus behind the Atlas, starting with the formation of Mile High Connects some 18 months ago, was the decision by the Ford Foundation to invest in Denver, said Catherine Cox Blair, Program Director at Reconnecting America.

“We have strong local foundations in Denver who came to the table,” including the Piton Foundation, which specializes in educational issues and is a co-author of the Atlas, Blair told Streetsblog. “Ford urged them to answer the question, ‘You are building this massive transit system, but how do your giving priorities align to support FasTracks? How can you augment access and opportunity for everyone?’”

The first step in making sure access and opportunity could be equitably distributed would be to make sure all stakeholders knew how their diverse range of issues — senior mobility, public health, education — connected to transportation. And the best way to do that turned out to be with maps.

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“Transit alone is insufficient to make a real estate market,” said Dena Belzer, the president of Strategic Economics, an urban design consulting firm. Her group is a partner in the Center for Transit-Oriented Development (CTOD), which this week released a new report on the effects of transit expansion on real estate markets.

Transit won’t, on its own, create a booming market for compact, mixed-use development, but if a city has a good, walkable grid and simply needs better access to jobs and centers of activity, it can do wonders. “There are sites where you can see that opening up access just really ‘popped’ things,” Belzer said. For the best chances of success, you need to use transit to connect underutilized land with walkable downtowns and employment opportunities.

The new CTOD report, “Rails to Real Estate: Development Patterns along Three New Transit Lines” [PDF], picked corridors in the Southeast (Charlotte, NC), the West (Denver, CO) and the Midwest (Minneapolis) to see how transit affected development patterns.

The big success story was Charlotte’s Blue Line – where transit “popped things,” as Belzer said. It’s the newest of the three lines, having just opened in 2007, at the height of an ongoing real estate boom. (It went bust along with the rest of the country, and all the big investors pulled out, but until that happened, everything was going great.)

Even in that short timeframe, this corridor saw the biggest spike in development after the opening of the transit line – nearly 10 million square feet of new development, compared with 6.7 million in Minneapolis and 7.8 million in Denver – and that’s along a rail line that’s only half as long as Denver’s (though tightly packed with 15 stations, compared to Denver’s 14).

Charlotte was destined for greatness because the city aligned its transit along all the right places, according to Belzer.

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This is the third installment of Streetsblog Capitol Hill’s series on key governor’s races. Earlier we brought you stories about a candidate who likes bikes but isn’t sure about transit in Tennessee, and the choice between light rail and bus rapid transit in Maryland. Here we turn our attention to Colorado.

Colorado is a classic swing state. Registered Republicans outnumber Democrats by a margin of just 3.5 percent. The state voted for Obama in 2008, the first time it went blue in a presidential contest since Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign. And before that, you had to go all the way back to LBJ.

But now this purple state may be losing its red. Gubernatorial candidate Dan Maes’ trainwreck of a campaign could leave the GOP a minor party in the state of Colorado. Could it have something to do with his bizarre allegations that bike-sharing in Denver is a UN plot? Or his zeal to de-regulate the oil and gas industries?

As Talking Points Memo reported yesterday, if Maes fails to attract just 10 percent of the votes next Tuesday, the GOP will be saddled with minor party status in Colorado until 2014. A recent Denver Post poll shows him at 9 percent. The Democratic-affiliated PPP poll gives him just 5 percent. Minor party status would leave the GOP at a serious disadvantage by limiting their fundraising and ceding their spot at the top of the ballot.

That doesn’t mean Democrat John Hickenlooper will just cruise into the governor’s mansion though. American Constitution Party candidate Tom Tancredo (formerly a Republican member of Congress) is making this race a contest, with Hickenlooper ahead by about 6 percent, according to the polling average cited on Real Clear Politics. They’re competing for the seat being vacated by Democrat Bill Ritter, who was rated the country’s greenest governor last year.

Tancredo is too singularly obsessed with immigration to talk much about transportation or environmental issues. But not Maes.

“This is all very well-disguised, but it will be exposed,” he said in August of Denver’s bike-sharing program, which Hickenlooper had helped to launch as the city’s mayor. “This is bigger than it looks like on the surface, and it could threaten our personal freedoms.”

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The Colorado governor’s race was always going to be one for sustainable transportation advocates to keep an eye on. The likely Democratic nominee, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, has built a solid resume of support for transit and bicycling. But recent events suggest the green transportation/livable streets stakes may be waaaaay higher than expected.

It turns out that Dan Maes, an insurgent with Tea Party cred vying for the GOP nomination, already has his sights trained on Hickenlooper’s transportation initiatives and their sinister origins.

The week after Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, Hickenlooper, and a few other guys in suits saddled up to try out Denver’s new bike-share system, B-Cycle, Maes weighed in on what this advance in transportation really means. Read all about the paranoia in the Denver Post:

Maes is warning voters that Hickenlooper’s policies,
particularly his efforts to boost bike riding, are "converting Denver
into a United Nations community."

"This is all very well-disguised, but it will be exposed," Maes told
about 50 supporters who showed up at a campaign rally last week in
Centennial.

Maes said in a later interview that he once thought the mayor’s
efforts to promote cycling and other environmental initiatives were
harmless and well-meaning. Now he realizes "that’s exactly the attitude
they want you to have."

"This is bigger than it looks like on the surface, and it could threaten our personal freedoms," Maes said.

I work in the shadow of UN global headquarters and, being an enterprising journalist, I’ve seen a draft of this plan. It goes like this: First they lull you into submission with the public bikes. Then they nullify the Bill of Rights, outlaw the English language, and strip away your American citizenship. Then they seize your SUV.

Anyway… Before you dismiss Maes as a fringe character who just showed too much of his crazy side to gain statewide public office, consider this. Three days ago he was edging out his competition in the race for the GOP nomination. If he’s elected, he’ll basically control Colorado DOT’s billion-dollar annual budget. So, all you global government-supporting bike riders out there, there’s no guarantee this will be a laughing matter in November.

This week, I was fortunate to attend the Open Cities conference in Washington (along with fellow Streetsbloggers Elana Schor and Aaron Naparstek), on the ways in which new media is shaping urban policy.

The takeaway, for me at least, was a clear sense that technology is dramatically changing the lay of the land for local urbanists. Better data (and access to data) are helping to identify potential targets for planning improvements and easier navigation of cities and transit systems. Blogs and social network technologies have allowed urbanists to better communicate with each other, inform the public, and influence local governments.

Rare is the big American city that lacks a vibrant urban blogospheric community.

But there was an odd disconnect at this conference whenever a national policy figure took the podium. Speakers came across as detached and awkward where the web's potential was concerned (Adolfo Carrion) or warm and interested but fundamentally unsure of the best opportunities for engagement (Raphel Bostic).

Whereas New York City Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan's talk to the gathering was invigorating because it was clear to all involved how speaker and audience could help each other be effective in achieving common goals, speeches from federal figures landed with the hard thump of uncertainty.

However promising the speakers' expressed goals were, it was less than obvious to all involved how the web might support or influence policy, and how the federal government might deliver tangible results.

I thought of this disconnect as I sat in a meeting on climate policy last night with Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley (D). In that discussion, it quickly became clear that the messages that are resonating with voters are not related to the economic consequences of warming or the moral case for reducing emissions. The messages carrying the day have very little to do with climate at all.

What works with the American people? A focus on ending dependence on oil and on generating clean energy jobs. Those are the priorities that convince voters to support the passage of a climate bill even after being confronted by an opposition message on the cost, real or exaggerated, of proposed plans.

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