Comments on: In Denver, They Get It: Bikes Are Good for Business

By: wooDave

wooDave — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 15:52:39 +0000

I moved from NYC to Denver a couple of months ago. Most business here do have bike racks set up out front to serve bikers, even the big box shopping malls. At the hospital I work at they recently converted a smoking hut into a bike shelter and there is also a secure, video-monitored bike cage. Unlike New York, it is never difficult to find a free rack, but this probably has more to do with the far fewer numbers of bikers (and people in general) here. As far as being bike friendly, we do have bike paths following the rivers, but aside from that you are pretty much on your own. However, the streets here seem practically deserted compared to New York, so I am not sure if there is a great need for protected lanes and such. I do miss flying by all the cars stuck in gridlock in NYC

Bike share is supposed to start this spring. It could be transformative or just hot air.

By: cat

cat — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 17:56:18 +0000

For some reason, it seems like this blog and similar sites are consistently anxious to cast Denver and Colorado as being bike-friendly and sustainable on the level of places like Portland. I don’t understand it. Is it because people here on the east coast idealize the mountains and the sunshine and, pretty much, the West as a whole?

As a former long-time resident of Denver, I wish the Denver-hype were true, because then I might actually still live there. One of the problems with Denver is that the city officials know they can earn this type of hype my taking highly publicized actions such as this, but the reality is that these actions only apply to the downtown proper area (the southern portion of the diagonal-grid section), where pretty much nobody lives. Outside of this part of town, Denver is only slightly better than any 99% car-dependent city anywhere else in the U.S, and outside of a few central neighborhoods it quickly deteriorates into mindless suburbia where nobody walks and bicyclists are unwelcome

I understand that people like to imagine that there are mid-sized U.S. cities out in the West that “get it.” But Denver is not one of them. The city has a long history of hyping up its downtown at the expense of the parts of town where people actually live.

By: JL

JL — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 15:30:25 +0000

While I commend the Downtown Denver BID for their commitment to bicycling I can’t say the same about Denver as a whole. The city of Denver and the surrounding municipalities (minus Boulder of course) could care less about bicycling as a serious mode of transportation. As a former resident of Denver I found the biking environment to be very hostile. Bike lanes stopped and started with maintenance being non existent. The “bike network” is a joke that was created back in 1993 with a lazy update in 2001.

I’d rather have Commissioner Sadik-Khan and the DOT over a bike friendly BID and $50,000 any day of the week. While New York has plenty to do for bicycling it’s certainly more bike friendly then Denver. Heck, it’s even illegal to ride or lock your bike along Denver’s 16th Street bus and pedestrian mall, the retail backbone of the downtown BID. How bike friendly is that? Actions truly speak louder then words and money in this case.