“This spring the DOT plans to introduce an $18.5 million smart wireless meter system based on Shoup’s theories. Called ExpressPark, the 6,000-meter array will be installed on downtown streets and lots, along with sensors buried in the pavement of every parking spot to detect the presence of cars and price accordingly, from as little as 50 cents an hour to $6. Street parking, like pork bellies, will be open to market forces. As blocks fill, prices will rise; when occupancy drops, so will rates. In an area like downtown, ideal for Shoup’s progressive pricing, people will park based on how much they’re willing to pay versus how far they are willing to walk to a destination. In a trendy area like Melrose Avenue’s shopping district, where parking on side streets is forbidden to visitors, Shoup would open those residential blocks to market-priced meters, wooing home owners by guaranteeing that meter profits would be turned over to them in the form of property tax deductions. That benefit could add up to thousands of dollars a year per household.”

Read the entire article at Los Angeles Magazine: Between the Lines.

“The City of Golden on Jan. 5, 2012, filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court for the District of Colorado against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to halt the transfer of federal land for the construction of the proposed Jefferson Parkway.

“Golden’s lawsuit maintains that the Fish and Wildlife Service violated environmental and other laws when it agreed to convey a strip of land in the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge to the Jefferson Parkway Public Highway Authority. Among other things, the lawsuit alleges that the Fish and Wildlife Service (1) failed to conduct adequate environmental analysis of the effects of the property conveyance and the Jefferson Parkway, (2) unlawfully rejected Golden’s separate application for the strip of land, and (3) failed to ensure that environmental effects on the Refuge were minimized.”

Read the entire article at Get the Facts Golden.

The sidewalk in front of some relatively high-density residential development near downtown Boulder (photo by Zane Selvans on flickr)

Over the last year or so, I’ve been involved with the planning and design of the public space that will accompany some of the first re-developments in the Transit Village/Boulder Junction, mostly Pearl Parkway between 30th St. and the railroad tracks.  I’ve primarily given feedback as a cyclist and pedestrian — someone who uses our streets under my own power.  Even in Boulder, those of us who don’t own, and only very rarely use private motor vehicles are still unusual.  Nevertheless, the long term goal of the TVAP is to have 60% of all trips in the region done by foot, bike or transit — anything but the much loved and loathed single occupancy vehicle (SOV).  I was particularly taken by something Tim Plass said in the PLAN-Boulder election forum this fall when asked to envision Boulder 30 years in the future: Every once in a while you’ll see an electric car on the road, but mostly it’ll be bikes and pedestrians and transit.  I agree with these goals; we should pursue them vigorously.  But the city being described by Plass and the TVAP is very different from the status quo today, and it’s difficult to take the steps necessary to realize it.  Sometimes I think of myself as a time-traveling constituent from this future city, describing what it is that we will want then, when the majority of people aren’t driving a private car everywhere they go.  One thing that I’m confident we won’t want is so much “free” parking.

How Much Does “Free” Parking Really Cost?

Parking often plays a surprisingly central role in our transportation and planning decisions.  Without it private automobiles are rendered useless, but it requires a lot of precious urban space, and it’s fabulously expensive — each parking space in a structure costs $15,000-$40,000 to build.  Surface parking is cheaper of course –$8,000-$15,000/space — but it destroys the fabric of cities by pushing places of interest away from each other, making car-centric cities hopelessly unfriendly to pedestrians, cyclists and transit users.  Yet somehow, despite its enormous impact, copious “free” parking is generally treated as an inalienable right by both developers and cities.  Its cost is hidden and almost completely socialized.  Each of us pays roughly the same amount for parking regardless of whether we own 4 cars or none, because the cost of parking is bound up in the cost of nearly all the goods and services (not to mention real estate) we purchase.  Broad ignorance of the real value and cost of parking results in some surreal discussions.

An example: the first agenda item at the Transportation Advisory Board (TAB) meeting last Monday was the expansion of the Neighborhood Parking Program (NPP) district on University Hill.  The problem is that lots of students, faculty and staff at the university don’t want to pay for an on-campus parking permit, preferring to park in nearby neighborhoods.  This ends up making it difficult for residents to park in front of their own houses.  The district has been slowly expanding for years, forcing “commuters” (many of whom actually live in Boulder and could bike or ride the bus instead) to park ever further from the university.  Residents purchase an annual neighborhood parking permit for $17.  At that price, the program can’t even pay for the signage and man-hours required to run it.  Commuters may also buy neighborhood permits, for $78 per quarter ($312/year).  Some members of TAB were concerned by the ad hoc nature of the University Hill parking district’s ongoing expansion.  “When will it stop?” they asked, somewhat incensed.  Staff had no answer, and that’s the surreal part, because there’s nothing mysterious going on here.  The parking district will stop expanding when the cost (inconvenience) of parking for free just outside the parking district on the Hill and walking (or biking, or taking the bus) to campus, is slightly greater than the cost of buying a CU permit. (Remote lot parking permits at CU cost about $120/year; more convenient spots go for closer to $600.)  On-street parking is finite and valuable, and it’s being given away for free.  It’s not surprising that this results in queuing (think Soviet era bread lines).  There’s some participation in the commuter permit program, but it isn’t as popular as the city would like, probably because people feel that buying a campus permit or walking from outside the parking district is a better value.  Of course it might also be convincing people to use their RTD pass, or bike to CU.  We can hope, anyway.

Valuing an on-street parking spot isn’t easy.  There’s only so much curbside space to be allocated, and demand is often large, because they’re so convenient.  Just as a point of reference, a metered space downtown brings in around $7,000 per year, most of which is re-invested in the downtown business district’s infrastructure.  I’m not some kind of market zealot — I believe in the value of some public goods — but here I just don’t see the case.  NPP districts continue to give the parking away essentially for free, but restrict its use to only the people who live right by it, functionally converting the public right-of-way into private property.  Ironically, the city is often usurping private property in the first place, in order to provide that right-of-way.  It would be simpler to just give the property back, and let the owners store their vehicles on it.  Or not — they might decide to use that space in some other way instead.  Neighborhood permit parking also fails if you try and scale it up, city wide.  If you’re allowed to park in front of your own house but nowhere else, then you can’t actually take your vehicle anywhere!  Whereas letting anyone park anywhere for free results in queuing, NPP is the equivalent of preferential rationing.  It’s a centralized and inflexible resource allocation decision.

One obvious solution is to meter the parking, and keep increasing the price until you have some target occupancy rate, allowing those who wish to pay to park to find a space easily.  One could also imagine a hybrid metered/NPP arrangement, in which residents can park at home for free (with a meter exemption permit for that block), but they have to pay the going rate when they park in other neighborhoods.  In the case of University Hill, the equilibrium prices would end up reflecting people’s willingness to walk from distant parking, the price of the permits for on campus parking, and their willingness to eschew the car altogether.  If the meter revenue were dedicated to improvements within their neighborhood (as it is with the downtown general improvement district) residents might not even complain about it too much.  Again, we can hope, anyway.

Planning the Parking in Boulder Junction

In the Boulder Junction/Transit Village area the city is managing parking in a slightly different way.  Within the area covered by the TVAP, residential units are subject to parking maximums.  That is, each residential unit will have no more than one parking space associated with it.  So the 319 unit apartment complex at 3100 Pearl Parkway will have only 319 parking spaces in its underground garage.  Another 70 unit development will be built by the bus terminal and plaza to the north of Pearl Parkway.  It will have 70 designated spaces in a shared district/RTD parking structure.  In this one block, there will be about 400 residential units, housing perhaps 1000 people.  According to the developers, at least 600 parking spaces will be needed to service this population.  The plan is to satisfy any additional demand with parking spaces that are shared between RTD, the planned hotel, and the district at large, within a single structure.  The city has been incorrectly referring to this arrangement as “unbundled parking.”  It’s really “shared district parking,” and it ought to reduce the number of spots that need to be provided overall.  This is because the times of peak parking demand for RTD, the local residences, the hotel, and retailers will be somewhat different, leading to more complete utilization of a very costly resource.  Clearly, this is an improvement over having two huge parking structures across the street from each other, one of which (the Park-n-Ride) is full during the day, while the other (associated with the apartments) is full only at night.

However, truly unbundled parking is far more potent.  It completely separates (unbundles) the finances of the parking spaces from the uses they serve.  Assuming you need a parking space, you’d sign two leases — one for the apartment, and one for the parking space.  This does two things.  First, and most obviously, it frees those of us who have no car from an unfair obligation to pay for other people’s parking spaces.  This can easily reduce rent by 10-20%, maybe $1000-$2000 per year.  This is significant, especially for low-income households.  Second, and more importantly, it creates a price signal for both developers and would-be drivers.  If a developer builds 500 parking spots in a 319 unit development, at a cost of $20,000 each and can only get $500/year for each space, they’ve built too much parking, and are unlikely to even recover their nominal investment over the lifetime of the building.  If, with only one parking space per unit, the rent per space goes up to $1000/year, then suddenly they’re making money.  Not much though — that cashflow represents an internal rate of return of only 3.8%.  To make the 8% or so that they’d like would require charging about $1700/year.

Now, if you’re a motorist, I suspect you’re thinking something along the lines of “I would never pay that much for parking!”  You’d just live somewhere else, right?  Somewhere with “free” parking?  Except that you would pay that much.  In fact, you probably already do.  The other place has exactly the same parking costs — you just don’t have any choice as to whether you pay them.  The developer is still going to spend $20,000 to build each parking space, and they’re still going to make their 8% return on the project over all.  If their marginal investment in parking underperforms, they’re just going to make up for it by charging higher rents.  Worse, because residents have no incentive to use less of the valuable parking resource, apparent demand will be large, and will help to perpetuate the belief that lots of parking is required, and providing all that parking drives up the cost of future developments.  With the TVAP the city has gone from imposing minimum parking requirements to imposing a cap, but without having any idea what the real demand for parking is.  Without a transparently priced market, it’s impossible to know.

The city has no control over how the 319 parking spaces within the 3100 Pearl development will be managed; it’s up to the developer.  What if they were enterprising capitalists, and decided that voluntarily unbundling parking costs from residential rents was likely to make them more money than bundling it all together?  How would people respond to seeing the real cost of a parking space?  In the University Hill parking district they’re apparently willing to walk several blocks each day to avoid paying the $300/year that an NPP permit costs.  Those who wish to drive would surely be willing to do the same to avoid the $1700/year that an on-site underground parking spot at 3100 Pearl actually costs.  They might park at Whole Foods or Target, and let those stores’ customers foot the bill.  Even more conveniently, if the Boulder Junction Park-n-Ride ends up being managed like the one at Table Mesa, then they could just park across the street for free, so long as the vehicle gets moved every day.  Even if it doesn’t, each additional day is only $2 — far less than the real $5/day cost — meaning RTD would be subsidizing their vehicle storage instead.  And then there’s the on-street parking…

The Futility of On-Street Parking for Residents

In the 3100 Pearl Parkway block there will be a grand total of 12-16 on-street spaces.  They will be managed by the Boulder Junction General Improvement District (GID) via its Transportation Demand Management (TDM) and Parking advisory boards.  These boards will be made up of local property owners and citizens at large.  Throughout the design process, the provision of on-street parking has been held sacrosanct.  The developers threatened to walk away without it.  The city sees it as a way to bring activity to the street, and wants it to serve the short-term parking needs of nearby retail/commercial developments.  Meanwhile, the developers want on-street spots to be available as overflow parking for their residents, whom they cannot believe will really make do with one vehicle per unit.  These goals are mutually exclusive.  If the spots are managed as NPP, and are essentially free, then their convenience, combined with the sheer number of residents in the area will ensure that they are always occupied, and that turnover is very low.  This will render the on-street parking incapable of supporting local retail, and minimize the activity it brings to the streetscape.  Serving those two goals means high turnover, and consistent availability of at least one spot per block, and the best way to do that is by metering the spots.  Otherwise, these free spots will cannibalize demand for paid spots in the shared district parking structure, and encourage resident drivers to cruise for an empty spot on the (supposedly) low traffic, pedestrian friendly frontage streets.

I’m not just speaking hypothetically here.  In Pasadena, where I used to live, a similar transit oriented development was built straddling the light rail line to downtown Los Angeles at Del Mar.  It too had restricted parking, and in Pasadena all on-street parking is permitted overnight, and available to residents for a nominal fee if they can demonstrate they don’t have sufficient space to store their vehicles off street.  The city was shocked (shocked!) to discover that many residents simply requested permits, and so the reduced on-site parking had no impact on the number of cars per household.  This resulted in curbside parking adjacent to the development being completely occupied, much to the displeasure of the neighbors and nearby businesses.  This is a completely predictable failure, which we should avoid.

Zipcar parking, Portland Oregon (photo by Rosa Say on flickr)

If we really wanted to use the on-street parking to serve residents, the only way to make it significant would be to dedicate some of it to carshare vehicles.  Zipcar, the largest carshare company in the US, estimates that each shared car substitutes for 15-20 private vehicles.  Incidentally, this is also roughly the number of people who can be served by one parking spot converted into a bike corral.  A single parking space in front of 3100 Pearl, if dedicated to car sharing, would do the job of all the parking spaces combined when they’re dedicated to private vehicles.  Our own local non-profit car sharing company, eGo CarShare has surveyed their membership and come to similar conclusion: a large proportion of their membership either gets rid of or avoids buying a second car as a result of the service. San Francisco now mandates by law that all new developments (either for rent or for sale) larger than 50 dwelling units unbundle their parking and provide on-site parking for carsharing.  The Bay Area’s non-profit City CarShare has put together a great selection of best practices and case-studies (PDF) looking at developments that integrate both of these strategies.  When I mentioned the possibility of a dedicated car share spot to TAB they were supportive of the idea.  Planning Board raised the objection that this would amount to allocating public right-of-way to private use.  Even if it’s true legalistically, this strikes me as somewhat disingenuous.  Neighborhood permit parking has the same effect, but ensures that the limited parking resource serves many fewer people.  Anyone can join the car share, and it means the limited parking resource ends up serving many more people.  If you want on-street spots to serve residents, it’s clearly the best option.

Thy (Unbundled) Parking Structure Overfloweth

The biggest problem with making the true cost of parking transparent is that it’s difficult to do in isolation.  You can’t effectively charge for something when someone else is giving it away for “free” next door — hence the issues with overflow from the NPP on University Hill.  To really work, all of Boulder Junction will have to have a unified parking market — the on-street parking, the shared RTD structure, and the underground lots associated with the residences need to have comparable prices, adjusted for how desirable they are.  Otherwise, people will simply flock to the underpriced, subsidized options, and leave the ones which are appropriately priced vacant.

Imagining a restaurant that was run the same way may help clarify the absurdity.  The normal “free” parking arrangement in the US is analogous to everyone in the restaurant ordering whatever they want, with the bills from all of the tables getting added up and divided equally between all the night’s patrons.  The 95 lb vegetarian waif and the 500 lb sumo wrestler gorging on sashimi pay the same amount.  Making parking costs transparent and unbundled in just one location is the like telling a single table that they’ve got to pay their own check, but that they’re free to go eat food from other tables.  This table then orders nothing for themselves, and wanders around grazing, letting the rest of the patrons pick up their tab.  Neither of these arrangements is fair, and both encourage people to order more expensive food than they normally would.  This is why most restaurants tend to charge people for the food that they themselves order.

Overflow isn’t necessarily a bad thing, if it ultimately results in transparent pricing being implemented in adjacent areas.  Eventually, as with the University Hill NPP district, the parking market becomes large enough that people just bite the bullet and start paying, or biking, or taking the bus.  This assumes that they’re really committed to their destination within the parking district.  The fear on the part of the city and developers is that people aren’t particularly committed to their destination.  Faced with the cruel injustice of being forced to pay for their parking in an obvious way, people might decide to go somewhere else instead and pay for their parking in an obfuscated way.  Fair enough.  We don’t have control over parking policy in Broomfield or Longmont.  Actually implementing transparent parking prices might drive some people away.  But we get something in exchange — we get a different kind of city, that will attract a different kind of citizen to replace those drivers.

Note From a Future Citizen

Freiburg, Germany (photo by adeupa de Brest on flickr)

Those new citizens are the educated, innovative young people driving us toward “Peak Car”.  We Millennials are less interested in having “stuff” than having access.  We’re dreaming a new American Dream that looks less like a McMansion and more like a neighborhood that makes you feel at home, with all your day-to-day needs met within a five minute walk.  When you aren’t driving you never even think about parking.  If we’re planning for a future when 60% of trips aren’t done by private car, when “every once in a while you see an electric car, but mostly it’s bikes and pedestrians and transit,” then we’re planning for a future in which most of the time, most people don’t care how much parking there is or how much it costs.  Allowing our durable urban form to be dictated by current expectations about parking is politically expedient, but a mistake in the long run.  It’s expensive, space intensive, and precludes us from building a truly livable, sustainable, human city.  If we simply allow people to see how costly parking really is and give them the freedom to make transportation decisions based on that information, we will have made a surprisingly large step in the right direction.

“To many folks who follow transportation issues closely, the idea that new roads create new traffic is familiar—yet it sometimes gets bandied about rather casually, as if it’s something that we know but don’t particularly need to prove. But there’s nothing casual about Duranton and Turner’s analysis. It’s thorough, well thought out, rigorous, employs careful controls to separate cause from effect, and uses the best available data for the US transportation system from (I kid you not) 1835 to the present.

“And while road skeptics will undoubtedly be heartened by the findings about highways and traffic, they may be troubled by another of the study’s findings: public transit has virtually no effect on traffic volumes.  The irrelevance of transit service to urban traffic volumes goes against both intuitions and the claims of many transit analysts. Yes, it’s easy enough to argue that if all transit riders started driving, then they’d clog the roads during rush hour; and conversely, that if a bunch of people switched from cars to buses, rush hour traffic would get lighter for a while. But as the authors point out, if drivers switch from cars to buses or trains, it has much the same effect as adding new road space: traffic clears up temporarily, but faster travel quickly attracts more drivers who take longer trips.”

Read the entire article at Sightline Daily:  Study: More Roads = More Traffic.

The yellow arrows point to Section 16. The dotted red line indicates the route of the proposed Jefferson Parkway. The Candelas project is the cross-hatched area. From http://www.boulderblueline.org/2010/11/21/jefferson-parkways-layers-of-complication/ (click to enlarge)

It’s been quite a week on the Jefferson Parkway front. Consider:

Fish & Wildlife clears the way for the Jefferson Parkway

Deciding against an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) on the Parkway/land-transfer matter, FWS (Fish and Wildlife) published their Environmental Assessment (EA) with  a “Finding of No Significant Impact” (FONSI). They’re ready to transfer a 300 foot-wide strip of land along the eastern downwind edge of Rocky Flats (Indiana St.) to the Jefferson Parkway Authority for construction of a private tollway in exchange for adding Section 16 (a plot at the southwest corner of the Rocky Flats site) to the Wildlife Refuge. The EA (500 or so pages) is on line at http://www.fws.gov/rockyflats/ea2011.html. Though the EA was signed on Dec. 2 it was not released until Dec. 15, and even on the following day was not posted on the web site of FWS. The timing and failure to do a news release on a matter of such public concern is puzzling.

Superior takes FWS to court

A lawsuit filed in federal court on Dec. 15 by the Town of Superior accuses FWS of violating the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge Act as well as the National Environmental Policy Act in several respects. Here is a summary of main points of the lawsuit:

• The Sec’y. of the Interior lacks the statutory authority to transfer land.
• The EA issued by FWS failed to assess the environmental impacts of construction of the highway with respect to contamination and urban sprawl.
• The EA failed to assess the environmental impacts of adding Section 16 to the Refuge.
• The EA failed to assess the environmental impacts of the Parkway on other transportation corridors.
• The EA relies on the Northwest Corridor Study issued by the Colo. Dept. of Transportation in 2008, though this study was never submitted to the public for comment nor did it include an EIS.

For these reasons and more, the Town of Superior finds FWS’ issuance of the FONSI “arbitrary and capricious” and “not in accordance with law.” Superior seeks a full study leading to an EIS.

A deal to end Golden’s opposition to the Parkway

The Jefferson Parkway Authority and the Golden City Council are evidently close to finalizing a deal that will end Golden’s opposition to the Parkway. Though a final document has not been made available, the deal would, among other things, provide funds to “improve” Hwys. 93 and 6, the routes through Golden that would be utilized by traffic to and from the Parkway. On Thurs, Dec 15,  the Golden City Council heard comments. Opponents of the deal expect a council vote very soon, and they are not optimistic. A few months ago the Boulder City Council and Boulder County Commissioners accepted a deal to end their long-standing opposition to the Jefferson Parkway in exchange for helping pay to add Section 16 to the Rocky Flats Wildlife Refuge. Now the deal-making ball has been passed to Golden.  For more on the opposition, see http://www.gothebetterway.org/.

Results from sampling at Rocky Flats

Those of us involved in Rocky Flats Nuclear Guardianship (a project of the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center) are very familiar with the map produced in 1970 by AEC scientists P. W. Krey and E. P. Hardy showing high concentrations of plutonium in soil on and off the Rocky Flats site.

Plutonium distribution in 1970

The route of the proposed Jefferson Parkway passes through the heart of the most contaminated area along the eastern border of the site. We therefore thought that construction of a highway in this area would stir up clouds of plutonium-laden dust. Accordingly, last spring we asked FWS to allow specialists in our hire, Marco Kaltofen and a colleague from the Boston Chemical Data Corp., to visit the Rocky Flats site to collect soil samples in the area being considered for the highway. The samples would be analyzed for plutonium content. FWS denied this request. So when our specialists came to Colorado in September they collected samples outside the Refuge fence along Indiana St. On Dec. 15, in the midst of dealing with the three items mentioned above, we received Kaltofen’s report on the sampling. Plutonium was present in six samples collected along Indiana St. Four of these samples showed plutonium at levels in the range of what federal and state agencies regard as average background deposits locally from global fallout — 0.04 picocuries per gram of soil (pCI/g). But two of the samples showed elevated levels, one about 7 times average background (0.270 pCI/g), another almost 40 times background (1.579 pCI/g). When I shared this information with Michael Dixon, an official of FWS, he said he was “relieved to see that the levels are not above the action threshold for the remedy that the EPA selected.” His statement brings to mind the words of Ulrich Beck in Risk Society: “Whoever limits pollution has also concurred in it. . . Acceptable values may indeed prevent the very worst from happening, but they are at the same time ‘blank checks’ to poison nature and humankind a bit.”

Locations where samples showing plutonium were collected (2011) along Indiana St.

Concluding reflection

The findings from our soil sampling are disturbing in several respects. First, the levels of plutonium are much lower than we expected, given the large concentrations Krey and Hardy had recorded in 1970. Since the plutonium used at Rocky Flats has a half-life of 24,000 years, it is dangerously radioactive for at least a quarter-million years. In human terms it poses an essentially permanent danger. The plutonium Krey and Hardy found in 1970 is still dangerous. But where is it? If it’s no longer present in the surface soil near Indiana St., it has either percolated down to deeper levels or it’s been blown away by the strong winds common at Rocky Flats. The first of these possibilities points to the need for the EIS FWS doesn’t intend to do. The second means the plutonium has been carried by the wind throughout the Denver area and beyond, some of it undoubtedly into the lungs of unsuspecting people. If they get cancer 20 or 30 years later, they’ll not know what hit them. This reality, of course, is part of the tragedy of Rocky Flats historically. Plenty of plutonium in the form of particles too small to see but not to small to do harm has been released across the metro area over the years. Yet there has never been any direct health study or medical monitoring of people who live or work in areas contaminated with plutonium released from Rocky Flats. Hence, no one really knows the actual health effects. This is a cost that has never been counted. And now the cards are stacked in a way that may prevent us from knowing the effects of building a highway along the edge of the Rocky Flats site. Carelessness trumps caution.

I learned from emeritus CSU professor Ward Whicker about 20 years ago that background deposits of plutonium from global fallout in soil along the Front Range of the Rockies in Colorado averages 0.04 pCi/g, plus or minus a factor of 2 (ranging therefore from 0.02 pCi/g to 0.08 pCi/g). I believe the determination of this number was made in the 1970s. The late Ed Martell, NCAR radiochemist, insisted that some people would become ill and die as a result of exposure to background plutonium distributed around the world. Here in the Denver area we’ve always wanted to know the effects of Rocky Flats, so we’ve tried to distinguish between background plutonium deposits and the plutonium released from Rocky Flats. If in fact plutonium released from Rocky Flats that was detected in the soil forty years ago by Krey and Hardy has blown away, what has happened to so-called background deposits? Hasn’t it blown away as well? With the decline of atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons less plutonium is available from fallout. We need a new study to determine current average levels of plutonium in soil from global fallout along the Front Range. I suspect such a study would demonstrate that we are comparing current plutonium soil sampling results with an average background  number that is inflated because it is outdated. It may be that samples that we regard as “no more than background” in fact are well above background. Who would like to join me in asking EPA and CDPHE to conduct such a study?

photo by Zane Selvans

Last fall, representatives from Community Cycles participated in a discussion with the city and various stakeholders regarding upcoming redevelopment along Pearl Parkway.  I wrote about the experience and the Transit Village Area Plan (TVAP) more generally from the perspective of a human-powered urbanist.  Mostly, we looked at different possible streetscapes for Pearl Parkway between 30th and the railroad tracks.  The property at 3100 Pearl Parkway is slated to be developed in the near future, as a 320 unit rental apartment complex, and as one of the first major developments in the area plan.  The city is interested in experimenting with novel street treatments in order to try to make the place special and attractive.  Community Cycles got involved largely because the TVAP “Connections Plan” had, with minimal fanfare, superseded the Transportation Master Plan (TMP) and removed the bike lanes which had long been planned along Pearl Parkway in favor of off-street only infrastructure.  We felt that this change was not necessarily in the best interest of cyclists, and wanted to ensure that whatever did end up getting built would be safe and efficient.

Unfortunately, the meeting last fall didn’t really come to a clear conclusion.  We only got through two of the four possible street cross sections, and were told that there would be a follow-up meeting to complete the process and rank the alternatives, but that never happened.  Actually it turns out that’s not true — it did happen — Community Cycles just wasn’t invited to participate again, so we didn’t have any part in ranking proposed designs.  The various options considered back then and the resulting rankings can be seen in the Transportation Advisory Board (TAB) info packet from the October 17th meeting (PDF).

Anyway, that’s all water under the bridge (and flooding the bike path) at this point. Recently several of us got to meet with city staff again to go over the somewhat narrowed universe of street cross section options, and give feedback from a bicycle’s perspective. The sketches below show what they look like. I’ll talk about why we picked what we did. You can click on the images for larger versions where the annotations are readable.

Across all of the options, we stressed that car speeds are not really a function of signage or laws, but are rather determined by the physical engineering of the space. If this is to be a human-friendly street, it has to be physically impossible for someone to drive too fast here. The treatment is only 2 blocks long, and the only reason for someone to come into the side-streets is to park. People can drive 5 mph for a block without suffering any hardship whatsoever. We also strongly advocated that the city prioritize completing the multi-use path connection along the Boulder Slough (the canal which passes behind both 3100 and 3000 Pearl Parkway), which will link the controversial “underpass to nowhere” near Ras Kassa’s Ethiopian Restaurant up with the bike path along Foothills Blvd. Currently the responsibility for construction of that path falls to the developers of the adjacent properties (because the path will double as emergency vehicle access to the rear of the buildings), but 3000 Pearl Parkway, which sits at the corner of 30th and Pearl, doesn’t yet have any definite redevelopment plans. Without the city stepping in to build that section, there would be about a 50 foot gap in the path for the foreseeable future, which would be pretty irritating. Hopefully they’ll be able to find a little bit of funding somewhere to get it done.

Alternative 1

Pearl Pkwy Alt1 (click to enlarge)

In this option, the existing multi-use path which parallels Pearl Parkway is retained, serving as a shared space used by both bikes and pedestrians.  It provides a 10 foot wide human-powered right-of-way in front of the stoops which open onto the street.  Immediately adjacent to the multi-use path is either a standard curbside parking lane with some trees interspersed, or the parking can be moved to the far side of the side-street, along the median separating it from the main thoroughfare.  The latter was our preferred alternative for several reasons.

We want the road to serve both cyclists who are simply traveling through this area, and those who are coming from and going to the 3100 Pearl development itself.  For the through cyclists, traveling in the same direction as the automotive traffic on their side of the street, we want the facility to be safe, legal and efficient.  For local contra-flow cyclists, who will be fewer in number, and not going very far, it simply needs to be safe and legal.  The 3100 Pearl development is on the south side of the street, so cyclists who are traveling eastward (toward the railroad tracks, Foothills Blvd, and the various industrial and office parks out that way) will be the ones going the same direction as automotive traffic.  If they’re concerned with speed and efficiency, and are comfortable sharing space with automobiles (as many relatively fast commuter cyclists are) then they can simply use the side-street’s automotive right-of-way, which will be very calm and quiet, avoiding potential conflicts with slower cyclists and pedestrians on the multi-use path.  Additionally, if we make the curb “mountable” (smoothly angled, such that one can ride over it, even obliquely) even those cyclists who would prefer to be on the multi-use path have the option of avoiding conflicts pretty easily, should the path become congested.

We strongly supported putting the street parking on the far side of the side-street from the building itself.  This helps to emphasize the shared, human-friendly nature of the street, as even drivers will have to walk across it to get to and from their vehicles.  It also removes hazardous car doors from the normal bicycle travel zones — for both those on the multi-use path, and for riders toward the right side of the side-street lane.  Putting the cars on the far side of the side-street is also important for another reason.  The automotive right-of-way is only 10 feet wide here; this is good because narrow lanes calm traffic effectively.  However, emergency vehicles claim to need at least 14 foot wide lanes for easy access on rare occasions (for some reason the Fire Dept. is convinced that its vehicles must increase in size over time, don’t ask me why).  Having the multi-use path and the side-street adjacent to each other, with a modest, mountable curb means that a fire engine has a 20 foot wide emergency access right-of-way.  The curb also acts as a “shoreline” for the visually impaired, delineating the separation between humans-only, and motor vehicle spaces.  The hope is that we can come up with a curb cross-section that can both function as this kind of guide and allow wheelchair access across it.

Alternative 2A

Pearl Pkwy Alt 2A (click to enlarge)

This is the “shared street” design which has been favored by some within the Planning Department.  Here, bikes and pedestrians going either direction, and cars going with the flow of traffic all share the same right-of-way, though it’s still necessary to create a small humans-only zone at the margin, to accommodate the sight impaired.  That area can be set off from the roadway either by bollards, or a curb.  The idea is that the area would be active enough that the constant presence of bikes and pedestrians would act to calm traffic, with cars crawling through as guests at 5mph.  We felt that this scenario was pretty unlikely, since the side-street is right next to a very busy arterial.  Pearl Parkway carries about 35,000 cars a day.  If you want to know what that looks and feels like, go stand next to Canyon Blvd. downtown some time, and try to have a conversation or just chill out on the sidewalk.  It’s not particularly pleasant.  Given the other better amenities which residents will have available to them — the courtyards inside the buildings, the very calm and quiet Junction Place, running north-south, and the Boulder Slough path behind the development — it seems to us unlikely that this area is where people will choose to linger.  There also isn’t going to be much in the way of street-level activity here.  There’s very little retail planned for this stretch of road, and only six of the 300+ units actually have stoops which open directly onto the sidewalk.  If you’re driving to/from the development, you’re likely going to use the direct access to the underground parking garage, and never set food on the street itself.  The majority of the building’s bike parking is also in the parking garage, so even cyclists won’t necessarily be passing through on this sidewalk.  Given all these issues, we felt that this particular “shared street” really won’t end up being shared all that much, and the 14-foot-wide travel lane would be an invitation to cars to travel faster than they really should, with the few pedestrians really inhabiting the narrow 4′ strip along the building side of the street, and no particularly safe contra-flow bike option.  It’s also unclear whether the city will be able to change the governance of this kind of space, giving bikes and pedestrians legal protection through vulnerable user laws (recently passed in New York, Delaware, and Oregon, and common in places like the Netherlands and Denmark where bikes and pedestrians are taken seriously as transportation), making any accidents which did happen here automatically the fault of the motor vehicles.  We felt that many, if not all, of Planning’s shared-street and place-making goals could be met using Alternative 1, with parking on the street side, while providing calmer traffic and better dedicated bike and pedestrian facilities.

Alternative 2B

Pearl Pkwy Alt 2B

This last design option has a dedicated contra-flow bike lane on the street-side, with parking along the building-side curb.  Bikes traveling with traffic would use the main automotive right-of-way, pedestrians and the disabled would be corralled in the narrow sidewalk between the parking and the building, and those few cyclists opposing traffic would be on the far side of the street from the building.  Nobody really thought this was a good option.  Because of the requirement for a 14-foot emergency access lane, there can’t be any physical separation between the contra-flow bike lane and the main side-street traffic.  Again, this provides cars with a 14 foot wide unobstructed space, which will encourage inappropriately high speeds, and there’s precious little space dedicated solely to humans.  I love the contra-flow lane on 13th St. downtown, but I think it really only works well because of the median separating it from traffic.  This contra-flow lane in the midst of many lanes of car traffic also poses major issues at the intersections.  How does a contra-flow cyclists integrate with traffic safely when they come to the end of the block, and have to cross the side-street traffic they’ve been paralleling?

The Saga Continues

At this point, it’s been more than a year since the initial design meeting.  The original developer (Scott Pederson) has sold the 3100 Pearl property on to someone else, and decided instead to work on the RTD center and/or hotel to be built across Pearl Parkway on the north side.  Ground is supposed to be broken on these projects by early 2012, just a few months from now.  We need a final design so engineering plans can be brought up  The above options went to TAB as informational items in October.  The developers signed off on either Alternatives 1 or 2A.  We advocated in multiple meetings and public fora for Alternative 1 with parking street-side, and feel that it does a good job of satisfying everyone’s needs: it offers on-street parking, buffers the residences from a busy road, provides good emergency access, a large amount of dedicated human-powered space, efficient through travel for bikes (on the road), safe local travel for slower bikes and pedestrians (on the path), a decent chance of being a livable space, easy snow removal, etc.

Unfortunately, the design has been tweaked by Planning yet again, so it won’t be a real agenda item subject to approval by TAB in November.  I’m very happy to have had the opportunity to participate in the process, and certainly hope to be able to give human-powered feedback to the city in the future, but at this point I’m also looking forward to this episode finally ending so we can move on to other more exciting issues.

You know, crazy stuff like… just how are we going to price the limited parking in the Transit Village?

Last week, the journal Environmental Health Perspectives published findings from a study by scientists at the University of Wisconsin on the economic and health benefits of switching from a car to a bike for trips shorter than five miles long in 11 metropolitan areas around the upper Midwest. Combining data on air pollution, medical costs, mortality rates, car accidents, and physical fitness, the researchers found that if inhabitants of the sample region switched to bikes for half of their short trips, they’d create a net societal health benefit of $3.5 billion per year from the increase in air quality and $3.8 billion in savings from smaller health care costs associated with better fitness and fewer mortalities from a decreased rate of car accidents.

Read the entire article at GOOD: How Biking Can Save Cities Billions of Dollars in Health Expenses.

Reference to these commuters is often made in Boulder’s discussions about such issues as housing, transportation, jobs, parking, traffic and sprawl. We refer to them in mass as if their wills might easily bend all at once to our well-intentioned wishes. I wanted to associate faces and real life situations to this number and drill down into some personal stories about why they live where they live.

Here are four stories.

The Artist

The useful life of artist Priscilla Cohan’s car came to an end. Without the financial means to buy a new one, she decided to go car-less. That was almost two years ago. Her decision would be unusual if she lived in Boulder, but it is even rarer than that — she lives in Lyons.

Her job downtown at the Boulder Art’s and Crafts Gallery makes her eligible for an EcoPass, but her comfort level in giving up her car mainly came as a result of the Lyons Community Bus Program. According to Boulder County Alternative Transportation Coordinator, Scott McCarey, Nederland has also received funding for a community wide bus pass that will likely start that in January, 2012, assuming RTD gets on board. The county is also working with the City of Longmont on a similar program.

The Artist, Priscilla Cohan

She doesn’t see the half hour commute into Boulder on the Y bus as cramping her style, rather she cherishes it as it offers her downtime she wouldn’t otherwise afford herself. She uses it to read the New Yorker, the subscription paid for with money saved by not owning a car. She’s also purchased a B-Cycle membership which, along with her personal bike, supplement her transportation options while in Boulder. Her entertainment opportunities are enhanced by the generosity of friends who lend her a car now and then and allow her to spend the occasional night in Boulder.

Years ago while working at the Boulder Public Library, her decision not to buy a house in Boulder was based on her desire to live in a more rural mountain setting. Lyons appealed to her for two main reasons. First, it had more of a community “feel” than Boulder. It was a good balance between the quiet of a rural town, yet compact enough to allow easy access to neighbors. Second, while she considered Nederland, the commute up and down Boulder Canyon did not appeal to her.

“I never tire of the drive between Lyons and Boulder, it’s so beautiful!” she remarked during our interview. Aesthetics trumped the cost of a commute, indeed, cost didn’t even enter into her decision.

She lives in the small apartment over the garage in the rear of her little house in Lyons, which she rents to a young couple. The improvements that Lyons has recently made to its downtown have made the community more cohesive. She volunteers and participates in many community projects in Lyons such as The Clarifier Project, writing grant proposals for the Lyons Historical Society and Confluence Community Arts.

“I would love it if my life were more Lyons centered,” she says, “but there aren’t any jobs there. So I have to go to where the jobs are.”

The Non-Profit Executive

David Dadone’s partner thinks he should hire a professional scheduler. As the Executive Director of the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (BMOCA), he attends many meetings that can be held anywhere in the metro area and some require a suit and tie.

He also enjoys hiking and yoga classes in Boulder. Consequently, his car doubles as a locker with changes of clothes always available to respond to unanticipated events and spontaneous activities.

The Nonprofit Executive, David Dadone

He tries to take the bus twice a week into Boulder from his home in the Highlands Neighborhood of Denver, but it’s often difficult because of time and location constraints of his many meetings. When he does take the bus, he finds it relaxing. “It’s time I can use to catch up on emails, work or sleep.” Museum employees all have EcoPasses and access to an eGo CarShare membership.

A native of Argentina, David grew up in Buenos Aires. Well, not actually IN the city but in one of its many suburbs, and ended up in Denver by way of a relationship. While working on his bachelor’s degree in Buenos Aires, he commuted for one and a quarter hours on the subway followed by a walk of ten blocks. “This is not an uncommon routine in big cities,” he says. That’s part of the reason that he doesn’t flinch at his forty minute driving commute into Boulder.

“Boulder is simply part of a metro area that extends from Castle Rock up to Boulder.” he says, “So, when considering where to live we considered the whole metro area.” As they narrowed it down they felt that “Lafayette and Louisville didn’t offer the kind of amenities that the Highlands Neighborhood has and, for five more minutes of commute time, we could live in a more vibrant setting.” His partner, a Denver native who commutes to the Denver Tech Center, selected the neighborhood, and though David would have liked to live in Boulder, splitting the commute was a higher priority.

The little craftsman style house he and his partner own is divided into two dwellings, affording them some revenue from leasing out the second unit. David tends a garden there and another one in one of Denver’s Urban Gardens community gardens. “I feel very fortunate to own a house, though higher density buildings instead of individual houses would provide more affordable housing.”

According to a January 2011 City of Boulder memo, Land Use Tools and Affordable Housing, higher density results in increased affordability only when coupled with Inclusionary Housing benefits in the form of permanently affordable units or cash-in-lieu.

Does the commute cramp his style? “No, we go out for entertainment wherever there is entertainment, if it is in Morrison, we go to Morrison. We come into Boulder, too, especially since the coffee here is better!”

The Analyst

Lori Krager and her husband had tired of living in apartments. They wanted a house with a yard so they could have a dog. Four years ago, at the age of 30, she and her husband set out to find one. At the time, she worked for Boulder County in the GIS department (still does) and her husband was working in Lakewood. They wanted a place located somewhere in between, so they chose Westminster. Boulder was never in the running as a place to live. They wanted a single family house and just assumed they would be priced out.

The Analyst, Lori Krager

According to AAA, it costs about $54.10 for every 100 miles driven. I asked Chris Ketterhagen, a Boulder realtor, how much more you could afford on a mortgage by giving up one car. According to him, a widely accepted number for miles driven per year is 12,000 which translates to $541/month in vehicle expense. At 5.5% interest, a full point above today’s rates, over 30 years, $541/month maintains principal and interest on $95,000. With a 10% down-payment, that $541 would maintain an additional $85,000 in mortgage.

Her husband now works in Boulder and, though Lori takes the bus to work most of the time, he drives every day. They don’t carpool because of their different schedules. Lori estimates that the bus commute costs her one hour each way, factoring in the drive to the park-n-ride, parking, walking over the highway and waiting time. However, she really likes the down time that riding the bus affords, “I’ve never read so many books or listened to so much music,” she exclaimed, “on days I drive, I miss my down time.”

“Most of our social life happens in Boulder after work. This as an advantage because it keeps us off of the turnpike during rush hour,” she explained in response to my question about whether or not her commute time allowed for activities outside of work and family.

A few times during the summer she will venture to work on her bike even though it is logistically challenging. The eighteen mile ride requires a change of clothes, brought to work and prepared a day ahead, and a shower afterward. She has a membership at the downtown gym that affords her a comfortable shower and changing space.

Does the commute cramp her style? “No, not really, we’ve been doing it so long we don’t think about it.”

The Designer

Colorado native Mac Bernhardt and his brother bought a house together six years ago. “We chose Broomfield because it is between Denver and Boulder.” says Mac, “Jobs in our field are either going to be in Boulder or in Denver, so a house in between made sense.” Mac is a designer for 505Design in Boulder. As an artistic and tech oriented professional, he sees himself as an undeniable member of the “Creative Class.”

In his book The Rise of the Creative Class, Richard Florida defines the Creative Class as consisting of two components “the super creative core” and the “creative professionals.” The former includes scientists, engineers, academics, artists, novelists and entertainers as well as the society’s thought leadership: non-fiction writers, editors, cultural figures, analysts and opinion-makers. The latter works in “knowledge-intensive” industries such as high-tech, finance, law, medicine and business. According to Florida, the Creative Class adds economic value through their creativity.

The Designer, Mac Bernhardt

After graduating from the University of Colorado-Boulder with a degree in Environmental design, he attended graduate school at the University of Colorado-Denver, after which he got a job in Denver, worked there for a year then moved to a job in Boulder. He’s changed jobs four times in ten years. So when he and his brother, a high school baseball coach and teacher, bought their house, it was based on the idea that frequent job changes are a part life and that since most jobs in his industry are either in Boulder or in Denver, a community halfway in between would make a manageable commute in either direction.

His is one of the many single occupancy vehicles heading west on the turnpike every morning. “The bus is not really an option,” he asserts, “my home is not convenient to a transit stop and it would take an hour to drive to a park-n-ride, take the bus and get to the office (just north of Downtown Boulder).” The dollar value of his time trumps the dollar cost of an average thirty minute driving commute.

His extra-curricular activities revolve around softball teams and games that are usually after work in Boulder. The Orchard Town Center, a quick drive from his home, offers many amenities such as restaurants and movie theaters. He doesn’t feel that the commute cramps his lifestyle. Would he like to live close to work? “It would be nice to live close to work, but with the turnover of jobs in the design industry and the struggling economy, it’s hard to predict where my career will take me.”

His brother married and moved out of their house three years ago and the house that he currently shares with roommates will soon become a perfect place for the next stage of his life, Mac is getting married next spring.

Conclusions

These four profiles begin to reveal the intricate nature behind individuals’ housing decisions. By acknowledging the myriad of complexities that rule people’s lives, perhaps our conversation about how to deal with the in-commuter problem can shift from one of numbers to one of understanding the fuel behind these complexities.

Solutions to quell in-commuting such as building more affordable condominiums inside Boulder City limits might help but are over simplified and not a panacea. We need to acknowledge and address the two-worker household phenomenon and the transient nature of modern jobs.

Innovations like exploring allowing workers to clock-in on the bus and city-wide EcoPasses coupled with an educational campaign about the true costs of commuting could encourage more use of public transit. Boulder County recently installed giant locked bike cages as an option to putting a bike on the bus to help with the “last mile” connection. On the private sector side there are technologies already in existence to help make ride sharing easier, while making offering rides a source of revenue. Policy changes that would allow additional housing solutions such as carriage houses and basement apartments that can also boost household revenues would put owning a single family house more within reach of middle class incomes.

Near the end of The Rise of the Creative Class, Richard Florida lists three types of high-tech communities: nerdistans (like Silicon Valley), latte towns (like Boulder) and old urban centers (like New York’s SoHo). Leading Creative Centers, he says, provide all three options. In fact, he points to the Denver region that combines the assets of Boulder and the urban character of the LoDo district to create its “nerdistan.” His view is that Denver is a region that includes Boulder and communities in between and beyond.

The four people profiled here can all be considered part of Florida’s Creative Class and, like Florida, understand that Boulder is part of a region. In striving to solve the in-commuting problem, we should, too.

 Thanks to Priscilla, David, Lori and Mac for their generosity in granting me an interview. I’d also like to thank Scott McCarey for helping me develop a set of relevant questions and Chris Ketterhagen for running the numbers. References are linked to directly.

For 15 years, Kempton, who directs the University of Delaware’s Center for Carbon-Free Power Integration, has pushed the idea that fleets of electric vehicles — rather than being another big draw on the electric grid — could provide valuable backup power on demand to utilities. This would reduce the need for costly new generating plants, and help ensure a reliable supply of electricity.

Utilities pay each other billions of dollars a year for such backup power through wholesale electricity markets, and Kempton believes that a hefty slice of that pie could be paid to electric-vehicle owners instead. Some industry analysts agree that the approach, known as “vehicle-to-grid,” could take off; a December 2010 report from the business research firm Global Data conservatively projected a global market for vehicle-to-grid that would pay $2.3 billion to electric vehicle owners by 2012 — and $40 billion by 2020. Kempton and his colleagues have made some influential converts in policy circles, too. Marc Spitzer, a commissioner with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, has described the plan as “the salvation of the automotive industry in the United States.”

Read the entire article at Miller-McCune:  Vehicle-to-Grid: A New Spin on Car Payments.

Two months ago an obscure but powerful local committee held a hearing on $1.5 billion in government spending, but no one testified. The hearing before the Metropolitan Policy Committee MPC, an intergovernmental group of local elected officials, was on a Regional Transportation Plan RTP that would largely ignore local concerns about global warming, livability and urban sprawl by investing $1.5 billion in highways over the next two decades. In the past couple years, the city of Eugene has held dozens of public hearings and meetings involving thousands of citizens to develop plans to reduce climate pollution from driving, increase bicycling, increase walkable, 20-minute neighborhoods and envision a city with less sprawl. But the RTP ignores all of that, envisioning a metropolis dominated by massive freeway projects.

Read the entire article at the Eugene Weekly: Road Overkill.