Re: ” ‘Living Streets’ may be a dead end,” Nov. 14 Vincent Carroll column.
Over the next 20 years, our city will grow by 30 percent, and all those additional people will want to get around. If our transit corridors continue in their current form, we can expect the positives (easy travel by car) will deteriorate, and the negatives (traffic, sedentary lifestyles and obesity, pollution) will increase.
We have a choice for the future of our public roads and our cities: more of what we have today, or we can work to build an alternative solution. The best solutions solve multiple problems, and I believe the Living Streets Initiative is just such an approach.
It proposes to work on five important problems:
• Traffic. How will we manage? Widening streets and capacity isn’t the solution. You don’t cure obesity by loosening your belt. The city’s Strategic Transportation Plan calls for keeping our corridors to their current footprint. So that means we need to move people more efficiently by expanding the mix of transportation options available.
• We need places to put the 145,000 households of people who will move to Denver. The city’s land use and transportation plan, Blueprint Denver, encourages redevelopment of our transportation corridors with density in the places where transit will be robust.
• Our city doesn’t get the return on investment from our transportation corridors that it could. If we have better transit and more density, businesses will grow around these areas and generate more tax revenue.
• Our costs for health care are rising because of obesity and our sedentary lifestyles. We need to make it easy to walk or bike to a neighborhood store or to work to incorporate activity into our routines.
• Sustainability. We are all feeling the guilt of driving too much, yet our street and city designs don’t provide much in the way of alternatives.
Knowing that the city will spend money on infrastructure and private parties will spend money on development along our key transportation corridors over the next 20 years, what do we want to demand from these investments? Do we design our streets simply to move cars or to build our quality of life?
Learn more about Living Streets (), and urge your civic leaders to invest in building places to live rather than just places to drive. Living Streets is a great vision of what our corridors and our city can become.
Eric K. France is co-chair of the Living Streets Initiative Task Force.
