Author Archive
Redeveloping the Boulder Community Hospital Site
The most important task of the urbanist is controlling size. —David Mohney As owners of the Boulder Community Hospital (BCH) site bounded by Broadway, Alpine, 9th Street, and Balsam, the City of Boulder has a golden opportunity to demonstrate [...]
Are Boulder’s Downtown Streets Off-Limits To Bicyclists?
Sidewalk cycling on Broadway between Walnut and Pearl What are the factors that induce people to bicycle? Two of the most important are relatively short travel distances and relatively slow motor vehicle speeds. Given this, the town center [...]
Is Boulder’s Transportation Master Plan Bold Enough?
Boulder has admirably established an aggressive, necessary objective: The community shall achieve an 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) production. Achieving this lofty goal will require adopting effective, historically significant [...]
Transportation is Destiny: Design for Happy People, Not Happy Cars
The following is a summary of a talk I was invited to give at a PLAN-Boulder County forum on Friday, January 24. As a town and transportation planner, I cautioned Boulder not to put too much emphasis on easing car traffic flows—particularly by [...]
Burn to Earn: A Cautionary Tale about a City Owning Its Utility Company
In March of 1986, having just obtained a Master’s Degree in town planning at Florida State University, I was happy to accept a job offer as the environmental planner for the relatively progressive college town of Gainesville FL — a town that is [...]
Big Box Retail: Why Are They a Problem?
From 2004 till 2007, while I was a senior planner for Gainesville FL, I was given the task of preparing regulations to better manage what is commonly called “big box retail.” I conducted several months of research. The following is a summary of [...]
