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But the geography has its downside: even the city government's website admits, “To tackle long distances and tough terrain, Coloradoans have become auto-dependent.” With one car for every man, woman and child, Denver's ownership rate is one of the highest in the country. In the 1990s, an outer ring of new freeways immediately became clogged, and even after the Regional Transportation District (RTD) started building a light rail system, highway congestion remained the top complaint for many residents. So while the region is booming, most of the growth has been of the car-fuelled variety; even Denver proper— population: 575,000—has a density under 3,700 people per square mile.

It's a problem van Hemert spends a lot of time thinking about. During the summer, he and two law professors co-wrote an op-ed piece for the
Denver Post
that questioned whether Mayor John Hickenlooper's “Greenprint Denver” plan—which aims to cut greenhouse gas emissions, increase tree cover and promote recycling—was green enough. Instead of advocating feel-good
measures, the authors argued, the mayor needed to get serious: “A city in which more people live closer to where they work and shop is a cleaner city (less air pollution from vehicles), a more efficient city (less fuel consumption), and a healthier city (more people bike or walk). If you commute 50 miles every day by car (even with a hybrid), no quantity of reusable shopping bags is going to balance out the pollution you emit and the fuel you consume.”

The piece didn't get much of a reaction from the round-table gang—which disappointed van Hemert—but a few days later, Vincent Carroll, the editorial page editor at the rival
Rocky Mountain News
, responded with a column that took particular umbrage at this line: “We will be happier, healthier, richer, more efficient and more environmentally friendly if there are more of us per square mile.” He blustered that “a more dubious claim can hardly be imagined,” but his rebuttal was unconvincing. In response to the suggestion that a denser city is a more efficient one, Carroll wrote, “The claim that low-density housing wastes resources on roads, utilities and public services such as trash pickup has been around since at least 1973 when the Council on Environmental Quality released a report titled ‘The Costs of Sprawl.' But this conclusion remains a matter of debate, and many serious scholars have taken issue with it over the years.” This is a classic tactic for conservatives: dismiss as junk science any research that challenges their reactionary ideology. But the most depressing aspect of Carroll's libertarian argument was that it reinforced the misconception—far too common in far too many places—that living “cheek-by-jowl with our neighbours” is unpleasant.

High density doesn't have to mean run-down tenements or living on the twenty-fifth floor in a city that never sleeps. True, New York City isn't for everyone; indeed, while some people wish they lived in SoHo or the Upper East Side, many more couldn't imagine a worse fate. And plenty of long-time Manhattan residents eventually make the move to New Jersey or Connecticut
after tiring of the noise, the traffic and the yardless lifestyle. Still, van Hemert calls Manhattan the greenest place in America. “If you live in the bucolic countryside on five acres, you need three cars to survive. You have a huge house so you're burning up a lot more fossil fuel and you acquire more stuff,” he argued. “There's nothing very green about it when you look at your ecological footprint and the amount you're contributing to climate change.”

Mid-rise buildings as low as five stories offer an effective and comforting alternative to intimidating towers, and even neighbourhoods filled with single-family houses don't have to take up so much land. “We love single-family homes in America,” said van Hemert. “But if we narrow our streets a little bit and are more clever about how we arrange things, we can still have high density.” Along with a greater concentration of units—in California, for example, some developers are building ten to twelve homes to the acre—he'd like to see more basement suites, granny flats, coach houses and apartments over garages. They provide affordable housing for those who need it and income for homeowners. By discouraging these dwellings, cities such as Denver are encouraging sprawl; fortunately, more and more residents are adding units anyway.

Even bigger change is likely to come with Denver's aggressive transit expansion. Americans don't often vote for more taxes and, true to form, the residents of the region defeated a 1997 proposal to pay for expanded public transit by boosting the sales tax. But advocacy groups, the business community, governments and some citizens worked tirelessly toward a second vote, and in 2004 the idea passed. Funded by the 0.4 percent increase in the sales tax as well as federal and other money, FasTracks is a twelve-year, $4.7-billion plan that will give the region 119 miles of new light rail and commuter train service and 18 miles of bus rapid transit. Knowing that the existing light rail service, though limited, had exceeded ridership expectations from the first day, cities in the region quickly fought for stations and to get their line built first.

A few weeks after I met with van Hemert, the new nineteenmile Southeast Corridor light rail line opened as part of project called T-REX (from Transportation Expansion), which included additional lanes and other improvements to Interstate 25. The infrastructure investment was one reason van Hemert, who knows people who have sold their homes and bought places within walking distance of new stations, thinks sprawl can be conquered in Denver. “There's a strong link between transportation and land use. If all you build are freeways and six-lane arterials, all you get are single-family homes spread all the way to Kansas,” he argued, adding that the new line will make a huge difference. “Around the stations, you're already seeing changes in the land use pattern and you're seeing changes in the way properties are marketed.”

Not that he didn't have some reservations. For one thing, density follows transit only if zoning allows it. But around some stations, the rules have stayed the same because either the planners couldn't decide what to do or neighbours opposed any changes. “It's a huge waste to have a station that serves single-family residential and a few strip centres,” he said. “But as you go farther south, where there was more opportunity, you're seeing some very high-density development that has already been constructed in anticipation of the light rail lines.” The planning community tends to prefer higher densities, more mixed use and a richer array of amenities, but neighbourhoods don't want change, so battles between progressive planners and reactionary residents are hard to avoid. It's not just that people in single-family homes oppose out-of-scale apartment towers going up right next door—that might be understandable—but those in three-hundred-thousand-dollar houses fight proposals for two-hundred-thousand-dollar houses. That's making developers and planners strange bedfellows. “The market will generally want more density and mixed use,” noted van Hemert, “so actually I often feel more comfortable speaking with developers and real estate professionals than the incumbent club.”

Parking never fails to rile up the incumbents. Because it's a problem at some existing stations, the FasTrack plan calls for twenty-one thousand new spots, and all but one of thirteen stations on the new line offer free parking. “Even though we're building all this light rail, it's completely car dominated,” he said. “We want more people to walk, but people are not getting out of their cars, they're driving to the stations, and light rail is just a convenient way to save on the hassle of parking downtown.” When people living near the stations complain that they don't want other people's cars on their streets, the local politicians listen. “We shouldn't be counting on parking garages,” argued van Hemert. “We should be counting on people coming by bike, by foot and by bus.”

Enticing people onto buses, which bear the stigma of secondclass transportation, is a challenge throughout North America, especially in the West. People who'll happily ride subways or streetcars shy away from buses even though they're cheaper to put on the road and more flexible because one breakdown doesn't snarl the whole system. Van Hemert's wife, who is originally from Montana, has never taken a bus in Denver. “She's a Western girl who loves her car,” he said. But the city doesn't have the density— or the money—to build light rail for everyone, so people will have to learn to love, or at least not hate, the bus. Dedicated lanes will help drivers see the advantages of the bus; so will better stops. Too many are now in uninviting spots without shelters or benches— or even, in some cases, sidewalks. “That's the next step to making transit work in this city—making the bus-riding experience more acceptable to get people out of their cars.”

Looking even farther into the future, van Hemert believes Denver will be the centre of an emerging Front Range megalopolis. Running from Cheyenne, Wyoming, down to Albuquerque, New Mexico, it could be home to more than 8.3 million people by 2035, an increase of more than 50 percent from the current population. “If that's going to be a sustainable, dynamic, economically competitive region—like a Los Angeles or
a Boston to Washington corridor—we need to be linked by rail,” argued van Hemert, who is the co-author of
True West: Authentic Development Patterns for Small Towns and Rural Areas
, a 2003 book that among other topics looks at car dependency in the West. In the short term, high-speed inter-city rail is a more expensive solution than highway expansion, but it's better for the environment, more likely to foster compact, mixed-use communities and be cheaper in the long run.

The region must also contend with a limited water supply. Since it's west of the hundredth meridian, Denver averages less than sixteen inches of precipitation a year, and some of the surrounding area doesn't receive even that much. Already large lots are becoming increasingly scarce as suburbs balk at the cost of delivering water to far-flung residents while developers are finding it cheaper and less hassle to build in the city, which already has the infrastructure in place.

Beyond the desire to conserve water, remain economically competitive and create more livable, healthier and ecological communities, van Hemert sees sprawl as a social justice issue. Since the country has more cars than drivers, it's easy to forget that nearly a third of Americans—including anyone too old or too young to drive, the handicapped and those who can't afford a car—don't drive. The Joad family in
The Grapes of Wrath
owned a truck during the Depression, but gas was cheap, parking was free and they didn't have to pay for insurance. A car is a much more expensive proposition today. Most of the people trapped in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina didn't have a way to get out of town; they didn't have a car. And with our aging population, more and more people won't be able to drive because of failing eyesight, senility or other medical problems. “I don't think it's appropriate for us to be building communities where the only way to live an active, successful lifestyle is by owning two or three cars.”

After some prodding, van Hemert gave Denver an average
grade on coping with the car. Like most other cities, it's still planning and building for the automobile, but attitudes are changing. When he and his family arrived a decade ago, there were only a few miles of light rail and people said, “This city will never go on the train. We are in the West, we love our cars and we have lots of space.” That wasn't true. Even though he knows some drivers voted to fund transit with a tax increase only because they hoped others would use the train, leaving more room on the roads, light rail ridership has exceeded all projections. And he's heartened to see condos going up downtown and even around his university. The battle isn't over, but he likes the trends. “We have to make it a little bit more difficult to use the car, we have to make the place attractive and we have to make walking and biking the obvious ways to get around,” he told me. “Really, what we're looking at is a paradigm shift in society, and it's happening here in Denver, but it's going to take time.”

AFTER MY MEETING
with van Hemert, I moved downtown. Although the Mile High City is polycentric, it has one of the stronger cores in the West. Established by gold prospectors in 1858, the place grew chaotically and not too beautifully. By 1890, Denver was the second-largest city in the West after San Francisco, with more than 106,000 people, but the downtown did not include a single park or public square. That changed dramatically once Robert W. Speer became mayor in 1904. “Denver can be made one of the ordinary cities of the country,” he proclaimed, “or she can be made the Paris of America.” He planted trees; built parks, playgrounds and parkways; preserved Cherry Creek; and erected statues. Heavily influenced by the then-popular City Beautiful movement, Speer also pushed for more attractive public buildings and created the Civic Center, a plaza just south of the central business district. Along with statues, fountains and formal gardens, the Civic Center is home to several public buildings, including the Denver Art Museum with its new addition designed by architect Daniel
Libeskind; the central branch of the Denver Public Library, built by the Andrew Carnegie Foundation; and the Colorado State Capitol.

The first thing I did was walk down the pedestrian mall on 16th Street. A lot of cities have experimented with car-free zones, with mixed results. People with money to spend soon tire of the clots of teenagers, the panhandlers and the ne'er-do-wells. Though the 16th Street Mall, which opened in 1982 along one of the city's major spines, had some of those less-desirables, it seemed reasonably healthy and I wondered if it helped that a free shuttle bus ran up and down the street.

Given that pedestrian malls are for tourists and shoppers, I wouldn't want to live on one. But that doesn't mean there aren't a lot of other places in central Denver that would be appealing. On Thursday, I woke up to the aftermath of the predicted blizzard and stayed put for a while. By the afternoon, though, I was keen for a walkabout. There was slush on the sidewalks and snow on awnings and cars, but while as much as a foot of snow had fallen in some nearby towns, downtown got a mix of rain and snow, and much of the snow was already beginning to melt. Still, it was cold and windy and, at first, a light rain fell. I headed over to the Civic Center and an up-and-coming neighbourhood known as the Golden Triangle. Then I walked down to LoDo. Denver's historic Lower Downtown is a gentrified neighbourhood that includes nightclubs, bars, restaurants, shops and galleries in the area between Coors Field, where the Rockies play baseball, and the Pepsi Center, where the Avalanche play hockey. Denver's Union Station is also here; like so many old train stations, it's grown tired—and, when I visited, was all but deserted. Not surprisingly, most people think the Beaux Arts–style building could be so much more, and the RTD, which owns it, has plans to turn the station into a transportation hub for the FasTracks expansion and make it the heart of a redevelopment project that will include residential, office and retail space.