I greatly enjoyed spending a few days wandering around Downtown Portland, Oregon taking photos and observing the city through my urban planning-colored glasses. Portland, as many of you probably know, is hailed as being exceptionally progressive from a planning perspective, and I wouldn’t disagree. There are certainly plenty of things Denver can learn from Portland to help make Downtown Denver even better. I will comment on a few of those, but I’m going to break my observations up into a series of posts because I don’t have time to record them here all in one sitting.
To begin, one of the first things I noticed that gives Downtown Portland a manageable, intimate pedestrian environment goes back to the original platting of the downtown area over a century ago: the width of the street right-of-way. From building face to building face, the span of the street right-of-way on most of the Downtown Portland blocks is quite narrow, particularly by Western U.S. standards. Here, take a look:
A relatively wide street for Downtown Portland has a right-of-way distance that would be considered average to most local streets in Downtown Denver. Here’s a Downtown Portland street with three (gasp!) through lanes:
Now, there’s nothing we can do now about the width of the right-of-way of Downtown Denver streets. But, we can do something about what we do within that right-of-way. Clearly, there are many streets in Downtown Denver that simply do not need as many vehicle lanes as there are today. In fact, one of the greatest battles that we must yet win before we can achieve true urban greatness in central Denver is with the city’s traffic engineering department. Most traffic engineers (and certainly not just in Denver) over the last fifty years have operated under a philosophy that their number one priority is to maximize the volume and speed of motor vehicles along the public right-of-way. This has left us with a Downtown Denver where even “local” Downtown streets have three or four through lanes, a parking lane or two, usually no bike lanes, and narrow sidewalks. At least in the central Denver area, we have to turn that philosophy on its head. The new Downtown Area Plan’s call for Downtown Denver to be a “Pedestrian Priority Zone” will mean little unless we can achieve a fundamental change in how we perceive and, consequently, use the public right-of-way. I know many of the folks at Public Works are completely on-board in this thinking but, unfortunately, there are still those in high places who are horrified by the concept of removing traffic lanes on Downtown streets. That is a battle that we must win before we can truly achieve an exceptional Downtown pedestrian environment.
Here are a few more street shots from Downtown Portland:
