I have spent the past few days in an area that many in the Washington region might envy. In Boulder and Colorado Springs, Colorado there are miles and miles of hiking and biking trails. Almost all of the streets seem to have bicycle lanes and there are actually dozens of people using them during the daylight hours. There are a couple of things that I find interesting though although I may be reading too much into the politics of the area.
Colorado Springs has a reputation for being rather conservative (some might say that's an understatement) and Boulder has a reputation for being an old hippie town with a liberal agenda (to some this is an understatement of Biblical proportions) and in some ways the approaches each take in terms of transportation reflect that.
For those who aren't familiar with the area, Boulder and Colorado Springs are about the same distance from Denver; Boulder to the west and Colorado Springs to the south. Each are right next to the magnificent Rocky Mountains which is where many of the trails are located. These are very healthy folks and the thin air does not hinder regular outdoor activities. But there are differences.
On the main road to Boulder (the liberal city) there are HOV lanes but on the main road to Colorado Springs there are none although the speed limit on Route 25 is a brisk, couldn't care less about the price of gas, 75 miles per hour. There are few if any parking meters in Boulder. Instead the city uses the group parking kiosks where you are given a receipt in the amount you've paid. It's amazing how much cleaner the parking areas are without the meters.
Boulder also does a better job assisting pedestrians get around although it is nothing like what we have in Arlington and parts of the District. They have a few countdown signals but have done little to provide safe areas in medians in which pedestrians can wait or knock-outs in the curbs. Boulder officials have also done little in the way of giving drivers advance warning of pedestrian crossing areas and it's even worse in Colorado Springs.
In each city it seems that zoning was just an afterthought. For example, to get to the Celestial Seasonings plant on the north side of Boulder you have to go through a residential neighborhood. Want to try some wild game at that historic restaurant near Colorado Springs? You'll have to go through two neighborhoods and ignore the trailer park and the tire "warehouse" right next to it.
All in all there are some incredibly beautiful things to do and to see in this region of Colorado. Many of us in Washington would love to be able to walk out our back door and have five-mile hiking trails just minutes away. But there are some other things that we do very well and for which we should be grateful, especially when we have to go into a city area to work. Yes, we probably wouldn't mind if the morning rush hour was actually only an hour long and the worst of it was waiting for two cycles of a traffic signal.
Steve Eldridge is a long-time reporter, observer and commentator on the Washington region's transportation issues. You can contact him directly by writing to: Steve@SprawlandCrawl.com. Unless otherwise requested, letters or portions of letters can be used within future columns. Letter writers will be identified by their first name and city/neighborhood.
Good commentary. I got my planning degree in Boulder, so this is a topic near and dear to my heart.
Colorado as a whole is, as a rule, way behind us on transportation and urbanism, but slowly figuring things out.
Boulder does a few things really well and a few things really wrong. Pound for pound it's the most pedestrian friendly city in the region; Downtown and University Hill are among the most pleasant urban neighborhoods in the mountain time zone. What they've done with their bus network is nothing short of fabulous - each route has a uniquely branded name and paint scheme, and they run small buses on short headways rather than big buses on long headways (more info at http://www.bouldercolorado.gov/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=9185&Itemid=3070).
Unfortunately, the prevailing attitude in Boulder is that the world ends at the city limits, so there are a lot of planning policies that push growth away to neighboring jurisdictions. Boulder talks a big game about environmentalism, but ultimately does a lot of damage by actively working against the principles of Smart Growth. NIMBYism is rampant in a way very much worse than what we see in Washington.
Colorado Springs is just kind of a big disaster area, from an urbanism perspective. Downtown is sort of OK for a city of 100,000, but the Colorado Springs region is five times that. Perhaps worse, there is very little interest in revitalizing it, or really in paying any attention to it at all. For the most part Colorado Springs is sprawl sprawl sprawl. It's sort of stuck in the 1980s in that regard.
Both cities admittedly have really good park networks, especially into the mountains.
Posted by: BeyondDC | June 25, 2008 at 04:01 PM