When the first car hit our family business at 13th and Washington, I was 9 years old. I was still playing records on my Fisher Price turntable – Disney’s “Chilling Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House” was my jam.
The last near miss was this last Saturday, taking out one of the crash bollards in front of the store, the ones we had to occupy the mayor’s office to get, the ones that the city removed the month before because they wanted a “pedestrian priority area.” Somehow, inviting cars onto the sidewalk didn’t seem like something pedestrians (aka all lovers of Wax Trax) would want.
Our store hasn’t been hit once, it’s been hit three times, and in the six years I’ve been back home in Denver, two bollards and one street light have been knocked over. That means without the crash protection we now have the store would have been hit three more times!!!
Our next move is to don mohawks and animal skins and blowtorch a couple of motorcycles and rocket launchers together like George freakin’ Miller.
Generally, when cars keep slamming into legacy businesses, that’s the cue for the mayor to walk in like a hero and figure out how to protect them, maybe by slowing traffic down. But instead, the only option that has been given to us, three years after providing the city an easy long-term solution, is to keep harassing the mayor’s office to get the bollards fixed. We’re getting good at that, and they’re getting good at responding. But bollards stop cars, they don’t stop people from speeding — the true problem.
Before I took over Wax Trax, I was a transportation planner of the progressive variety out in Boston. My specialty was street design that is more protective of pedestrians and bikes, as well as speeding up buses, strategizing how taxis can serve people of all abilities, and even strategizing how pedestrian areas can attract more hanging out (a key measure of a neighborhood’s “vibrancy” in the planning parlance, but also a measure of it being fun to hang out in). When I was an advocate before that, I’d get interviewed on nightly newscasts about how failed street design caused the latest fatal crash.
I last worked for HDR, a global planning and engineering firm with 225 offices, one of which is situated at the top of the TIAA Cref building in Denver’s skyline. If I hadn’t had to take over Wax Trax during the 2020 pandemic, I would’ve helped a team design the City of Boulder’s bike to school program. When I did take over the store, I refreshed my attention on 13th Ave and Washington, and thought, well here’s a nice little project I can continue my old work on.
No such luck.
I helped organize two dozen businesses to figure out a solution, and they all signed on to a letter asking to narrow 13th Avenue in front of the store and to get rid of the race-track style crash wall (the one that seems to wave the green race flag every couple of minutes). Our suggestion for fewer lanes is a modest one, one that we think is practical with a city resistant to change (unless you want to add thousands of apartments to a vacant lot–they love that of course), but it is not the safest possible design. The safest would be to go back to 13th being a two-way street.
Originally 13th, 14th, 17th and 18th avenues were all built as two-way streets, similarly to South Gaylord, South Pearl Street, or Tennyson St – all among Denver’s most successful and vibrant retail streets. The change to one way on 13th and many other Denver streets came during the post WWII period when the country went crazy for cars, even going so far as to rip out all the streetcar tracks all these avenues had. Why are businesses on South Pearl, South Gaylord, and Tennyson streets thriving while retail from 17th through 13th in Capitol Hill still struggles?
Heavy high speed traffic.
There is a lot of research out there on this basic dynamic, including a team that collected data from the midwestern city of Louisville KY, where some one-ways were converted back to two ways. The team found that not only were crashes of all kinds lower on two way streets, but so were visual cues of degradation and neglect. Other studies have even shown that neighbors are more likely to know each other on streets with slower traffic. Logan Street’s historical advocacy to move from a one way to a two-way proves this point. But, put neglect and isolation together, and you also get some crime.
In Denver, all of this makes sense along with when you look at how all the one-ways that criss-cross Capitol Hill affect things. While other parts of the city get tons of investment and love, the blocks between 13th and 18th feel half finished. Parking lots compete with vacant office buildings or lovely old apartment buildings, and parking lots win on several blocks. Some businesses like ours survive (we’re stubborn) but many other businesses come and go, because it’s sometimes hard to attract enough customers to a spot where cars are whizzing by. And this all happens within a stones throw of the Capitol and a 10-minute walk to downtown.
Not to say Cap Hill suffers the worst among neighborhoods, there are several candidates for that award in the city, but it might be among the biggest wasted opportunities. The bones of the neighborhood and the people in it are phenomenal and the history is rich. If the 1950s traffic engineers with their pocket protectors and calculators hadn’t over-engineered Capitol Hill to serve cars instead of people, Cap Hill could have twice the housing and twice the thriving businesses as it does now, and be 100% pleasant to walk through from end to end. There’s nothing saying that we couldn’t bring that reality to the neighborhood, and repair what should be part of the heart of Downtown. Nothing except a few traffic engineers who are still stuck in the 1950s mindset of cars cars cars, while neglecting the people who live and work in Capitol Hill.
Excellent. Well written and very informative and instructional. Also very logical. Wouldn’t it be nice rather than one way it was no way.