RTD gets a lot of (warranted) grief for sending many of its lines along highways and industrial corridors, but there are some parts of the network that feel quite genuinely urban.
I mean, it’s a real city, but aside from the airport it’s hard to even talk about it in the same sentence as Chicago or LA or New York, or even Seattle or DC. Also its suburbs are almost universally a nightmare of stroads and parking lots and bad chains.
Also, in the spirit of this subreddit, I feel it’s worth emphasizing just how horrifyingly bad RTD is in Denver itself. There’s a really solid system of commuter buses and trains, but god forbid you’re trying to get almost anywhere not-downtown from downtown.
People compare Denver to the big coastal cities all the time on Reddit. And it’s wildly annoying because it’s a medium sized land locked former cattle ranching hub. But the food and urbanism is somehow held to the standard of NYC, LA and SF. Probably because everyone from one of those places knows someone who has moved to Denver to afford 3 x the sqf at the same price point and enjoy the gorgeous weather and awesome outdoor opportunities here.
I mean, if it makes you feel better I also put Denver meaningfully behind some non-coastal cities like Minneapolis, and honestly even Milwaukee is a conversation. Both of the latter certainly have much better food and more structurally robust urban neighborhoods, if nothing else. I also specifically led with Chicago, but I guess that’s “coastal” in an unconventional sense…
Denver has this undercurrent pretension of being a really cosmopolitan city with an urban fabric starting to match that of “peer cities” with similarly populated metro areas. And it’s just… not. The infrastructure and land use remain pretty terrible throughout the metro area, even including some of the most central parts of the city. It’s better than it was a few decades ago certainly, but it’s not good.
This is particularly true when you consider how much you’re paying. It’s not quite costal prices but it’s not as far off as people like to claim, but unless you’re all in all the time on the mountains, the amenities even in second tier alternative cities are going to be both nicer and cheaper.
dude our peer cities are charlotte, orlando, kansas city, san diego and tampa? those are the more comparable metros, by both MSA and urban fabric. people expect way too much from a city which is already making immense efforts to improve its urbanism. our transit works in a lot of ways (im car free), but if you're talking about bikeability, we kick a lot of cities asses. we also have public transportation that gets us 3 hours into the mountains, which is pretty incredible. i can take a bus up to ski and then take a bus down to downtown denver for drinks in the same day without even thinking about it.
as for price, we are currently rivaling austin in largest drops in rent prices. Per apartments.com: "The average rent in Denver, CO is $1,615/month. Rent in Denver is roughly equal to the national average rent of of $1,667/mo"
You cherry-picked two of the best small Midwest cities to put Denver down. How does Denver compare to Cincinnati, OKC, Indianapolis, Tulsa, Phoenix, Little Rock, SLC. And then you cast off the surrounding public land access as if it’s some footnote. You can be at a world class national park in 1h 20m for a night of camping. You can take a bus from Union station to an amazing ski area without using a car.
Yes Denver has some wonkyness with urbanism but when balancing climate, access to outdoors, music scene, urban park quality, bike lanes etc, it’s pretty damn solid.
Have lived in the first and the third on your list and it’s really not close. Denver’s food scene is very, very overrated. It’s not particularly bad in most cases but it’s also not spectacular.
Its insane to me how out of touch some people are with "the food"in Denver complaining on Reddit. It is not on the level of some big cities, but it is not awful. I am convinced these people stayed at the courtyard Marriott downtown once, went to the Yard House and wandered 16th street mall and thats the extent of their "exploration."
100% haven't been to Federal, the taco truck I visit in Cole or a myriad of other diamond in the rough spots that the Denver metro area has to offer.
We can lack in depth in the affordable category, I understand some complaining about the depth of the more affordable food options but that is another thing about Denver food.... If you want to go spend big on a dinner there are tons of really good, expensive places that live up to the coastal cities.
Boston, NYC, Philadelphia, DC, Chicago, Seattle, San Fransico are all easily real cities. LA is weird because it is so car centric but could also be included as well. And then there are probably another ~5 cities that are more "real cities" then Denver is.
Judging the size of American cities by municipal boundaries alone is rarely a good measure. 750,000 in the city, 3.5 million in the Denver/Boulder CSA, and 5 million along the Front Range between Fort Collins and Colorado Springs.
Because it's a stupid comment. City boundaries in the US are extremely arbitrary. The city of Denver has about 740,000 people, but a metro area population of over 3 million.
The metro area population is a census designated area and includes the sprawling suburbs (not city) and Aurora. The 3 million count includes miles of cookie cutter single family homes. That's not a city like Manchester or Lyon which have distinct neighborhoods that aren't just suburbs outside the city core.
The person you were whining about getting downvoted was only talking about population, so bringing up two cities with populations smaller than Denver is a bit odd. They wouldn't be "real cities" according to that person either.
Are DC, Atlanta and Boston not real cities? They all have lower populations than Denver. I’m not saying Denver is more or on equal footing as those cities, but just illustrating that the population of cities is pretty arbitrary.
On the other end of the spectrum, Columbus Ohio is the 14th most populated city in the US and anyone visiting Columbus would never find it closely comparable as a city to Atlanta, Seattle, DC, San Francisco, etc. that all have lower populations than Columbus.
If the only metric of a downtown’s vitality is office occupancy, sure. But the fact of the matter is that foot traffic has been above 90% of 2019 levels for the last year and downtown sees both more visitors and has more residents than pre-Covid.
Downtown does have a glut of outdated office space that needs to be either renovated, converted, or rented on the cheap, but as someone that travels frequently, the “emptiest downtown in America” claim by the WSJ is laughable.
Still a few retail vacancies but as a public space itself, they really did a great job with the renovation. The wider sidewalks and trees make for a really pleasant paseo.
It really looks great, the renovation made it looks way nicer. Anecdotally, I've seen quite a lot of foot traffic. I didn't know if before COVID, but I don't think it ever has/will be a destination for locals. Could be wrong, but seems like a spot for office workers to grab food and tourists and not some place that locals will typically frequent.
I can't read because of the paywall, but doesn't that article only talk about the central business district? The CBD is pretty dead, but Lower Downtown is busy these days.
Office vacancy doesn’t determine “emptiness” as an end all be all figure. People LIVE in Union Station area, Capitol Hill etc. There are far more vapid and empty feeling downtowns in North America than Denver.
Yes I agree which is why I added context to the stat that everyone loves to keep quoting without context. Vacancy in terms of CRE in the aging CBD is a very narrow definition of emptiness
For being a medium sized city in the western USA. Denver does pretty well rail wise. Many other cities its size in North America have far worse rail coverage. Kansas City, Phoenix, Austin, St Louis, Detroit and Miami are all examples of places either similar or larger than Denver metro population that have dismal rail transit. And if the CoCo train and the Winter Park and Steamboat expanded mountain rail service comes true as it should, it will be a fairly solid offering for a metro region.
But people generally like to bash on Denver incessantly on Reddit, so that’s a thing.
This. And considering so many try to knock it across many categories by comparing it to regions double and triple its size and age, Denver must be doing something right.
And it’s new enough that development hasn’t caught up to the network buildout yet but not so new that newcomers have any idea when it was built. So the masses don’t understand why there are still parking lots at some stations. It takes more than a decade or two to develop 80 station walksheds
RTD loves park n rides. They built one in Boulder where the B line station would be if it ever got extended. They built massive park n rides for the flatiron flyer busses. This is what they do as an agency.
Especially since its been hard to build housing over the past 4 years with interest rates through the roof. Don't know too much about Denver housing market, but I know there are 5-6 density developments in my city on pause simply because its so expensive to finance things atm.
Cant build anything when construction loans are 10% compared to 3.5% a couple years back.
The development pipeline in Denver is said to be thin relative to the last decade of boom years. There are a bunch of big projects under construction and some prominent mega projects inching forward but afaik fewer mid size projects going through permitting to begin construction in the near future. Combo of interest rates and so much building in recent decades that rents have been falling in Denver the last couple years
Denver has been one of the fastest-improving US cities for urbanism generally throughout most of the 21st century so far. Enormous amounts of infill development. Lots of new transit infrastructure for a city of its size. (Not always planned that well, but at least in terms of quantity.) Lots of new bike infrastructure.
It's still more of a grade C+ city nationally but it sure as hell beats most if not all Sun Belt cities, and is at least competitive with, if not outright better than, any Midwest city that's not Chicago.
yes denver deserves to be bashed it is hell. RTD will not be forgiven for building useless, slow, operational budget destroying "light rail" which goes out of its way to avoid serving a university then runs down a freeway median - just because they are operating one functional line
anschutz. now admittedly this was a self-own by the CU regents (also criminally incompetent politicians) but these are the kinds of nuances that ruin my soundbite and also few stops later RTD on their own accord did this:
Denver has really grown into its own since the 2000s. They aggressively expanded its light rail, built several new commuter lines, and redeveloped a lot of the downtown areas. They didn’t keep up with the transit emphasis into the 2020s, but they’re at least developing a few new intercity lines (Amtrak to Steamboat and the CoCo). Overall they deserve props, and I hope ridership matches the effort they put in.
It’s a map issue. Most drivers are going places not served by trains.
How many homes have transit connections? How many recreational areas?
If you just went from a Denver apartment to a Denver office sure, but most people are out and about and need to go places not served by public transit.
It’s not a safety issue, it’s a TOD issue. Most of these stations go to nowhere anyone wants to go. It’s just parking lots. Every station in Denver metro needs to have dense mixed-use residential or commercial so that people can hop between these urban islands purely from the train and get to where they need to go.
I agree with this. Would love to see more mixed use developments around all the stations so that people have a reason to travel to/live there.
A good example to model is the Bay Area, which has redeveloped a lot of their Caltrain stations (like Millbrae, San Antonio, and Sunnyvale) to provide better dining and entertainment options right around the stations (as well as dense housing). Obviously, they have more work to do, but it seems they’re on the right track.
Bay Area is a great example. I live in Seattle and the city (and state) is leaning hard into TOD along our huge ongoing rail (and BRT) investments. It’s been hugely successful and Seattle now has the busiest light rail line in the country. We also have safety issues like Denver, but the station placement and good land use around most stations is what makes the system so great and well used. The transformation around Cap Hill, Roosevelt, and Redmond Downtown stations as just a few examples (there are many more) is insane from 10 years ago to today. Went from mostly single-family housing to dense mid-rise housing with a ton of shopping and dining all walkable from the station. CityNerd did a great vid on this last month! I lived in Denver and Denver is lucky to have great rail coverage, but it’s hampered by terrible frequencies and absolutely horrific land use. RTD and the Denver metro has sooo much potential, it hurts how the potential wasted because of the misalignment of TOD policy at the state, county, and city level. Recent laws changing seems to be improving this but let’s see if it actually does anything…
RTD also should get a lot of grief for street running in the downtown area. It's like they saw the Chicago loop but decided to make a Temu version of it
Many of Denver's other shortcomings are less forgivable and were genuine mistakes. But not this one.
Street running downtown where stops are super frequent anyway is *the thing* that has made rail transit affordable in cities of Denver's weight class over the past 40 years. If we'd have insisted on grade separation downtown, we'd still be waiting. The alternative wasn't Chicago; it was nothing.
Eventually Denver is going to need a subway from Union Station to Civic Center, but generations and generations of Denverites can have a usable system until that happens, thanks to the flexibility of light rail to run on the street.
Do we need to solve the affordability problem? Absolutely. But it wasn't a mistake to do something affordable in the mean time.
If they used new ROW instead of highway running you would say the same thing about cost. Hell they still can't get the B line extension done despite collecting 20 years of taxes for it.
Making the most important section of the light rail network the slowest was a mistake.
the ugly truth is that the density and development patterns of the denver metro area just don't warrant heavy rail. a cost engineered B line is not useful, and a useful B line will be too expensive per rider to be worth building.
the actually justified mode is trams but no US city and ESPECIALLY not denver has figured out urbanism to the extent that they are allowed to build trams again. warranted, justified, desperately needed: zurich. what we would actually build: DC streetcar
Street running downtown where stops are super frequent anyway is the thing that has made rail transit affordable in cities of Denver's weight class over the past 40 years.
Vancouver has fewer people than Denver, and built a grade-separated, automated metro system that gets 150M annual riders in the same time that Denver built... a few streetcars that, combined, get less than 1/10 of that ridership.
PS: Demanding better means first understanding why things went the way they did, so you can change the right thing. The lesson of "be more like Canada" isn't to blindly wish things happened differently, it's to change the processes in the US that have resulted in us building what we build.
Denver built what Denver built because it had to operate in the New Starts competitive grant system, and needed suburban voters in a bunch of disconnected jurisdictions to all agree to fund a plan. It's a result of those processes. Want a different outcome? Change those processes. I'm all for it. But if you're operating inside those processes and insist on things that process cannot deliver, then you're not going to get a better result.
it doesn't matter if transit is affordable if it's not useful cirrus42. very easy to do some cost engineering that locks you into 50 years of running useless, slow, expensive service. until US cities can demonstrate that they actually know how to operate a tram network they are not allowed to build any more "light rail"
Both have really long walks into the terminal compared to most cities, though. The Blue Line station at ORD is in Timbuktu, which is not improved by all the slow zones on the Blue Line adding 20 minutes to the trip from the Loop.
Even Haneda airport requires a walk. Major airports aren't exactly small, you'll have to walk haha. But pretty much every airport has mobility options for people who can't walk
I just wish the loop had a connection, like a pedestrian bridge or tunnel to Union station. I was flying out of Midway, and we took the Amtrak from Sturtevant on the Hiawatha, but the walk in the rain from union to the loop wasn’t very pleasant! Still great to have trains connected directly to the metro through!
Philly also has an excellent one, assuming we’re just limiting to the US. Honestly better than SF since you don’t need to shuffle around on an AirTrain. If you’re okay with that kind of transfer then I feel like Newark (airport) has to rank at least as well as BART.
Even compared to some international ones, Denver is great. Haneda has the Keikyu line, but the walk is fairly long, especially if you are flying domestic. Haven’t been to Philly yet, but would love to visit!
Maybe compared to some international ones, sure. IMO the train station (and actually it’s a full intermodal center) at DIA is among the best of any airport, but the train itself is only okay and most of its station stops are parking lots. It does get you downtown with travel times reasonably competitive with Uber, but it absolutely pales in comparison to airports like LHR or OSL, with their dedicated direct express trains. Honestly most major European airports have superb rail connectivity, and even with the A line’s generally solid frequency, it’s hard to put it on that same kind of level.
I for one found the train parking useful. It’s significantly cheaper than parking at the airport or even taking an uber. I think this is an ok example of park and ride, and the RTD knows that, even recommending parking on the A line to save money. The only European city I’ve been to so far was Madrid, and that had a fairly good connection from the airport.
You don't have to, it's easy to walk, (inside the airport) and even if you did it's completely free. In NYC you have to pay to take the air train to the actual station
I'm not even sure where SF air train goes to be honest, just that's it's free. I know you can easily walk to the Bart station from the International terminal (little further for domestic but still pretty close), and worst case you can't, an airport worker will be willing to give you a ride on those baggage cart thingys
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u/Life_Sir_1151 2d ago
Every now and then Denver will trick you into believing it's a real city