Downtown Denver has evolved in many positive ways since I lived in a northern suburb in the early 1970s. In those days the air was green with commuter car exhaust every weekday morning and the somewhat toxic "Brown Cloud" that morphed from the green gases often hung around on weekends. Downtown was a wasteland of urban decay, and suburbs were awful it you wanted to bike downtown. I fled to a West-slope mountain community at the start of the ski season.
Over the past 30 years all kinds of redevelopment has occurred, with much of it finding new uses for the warehouse district, accompanied by a gradual improvement in the bikeability of some central city streets. With our older son living in that state the past 6 1/2 years, we visit Denver nearly every summer, and some winters. There is a new multi-modal transit hub under construction, featuring a renewal of the wonderful Union Station, being unified with light rail, bus, and bike routes, including the Platte River bike trail, and the 16th Street pedestrian mall. The Platte trail is pretty lovely unless you look up over the river bank and gaze upon the incredible chaos of the industrial portions of the river corridor... The highlight of downtown for me is arriving by train and using the hour-plus service layover to walk to the 1880's block of Larimer Street, where there is a very good all-purpose bakery-café with reasonable prices. Look for the narrow white-front building with a line of hungry people trailing into the door... I think the transit center is scheduled to be completed this year, but during the Union Station rebuild Amtrak stops at a temporary little cement block bus station-like hovel that's a bit dissociated from downtown. Until Union Station is back in service, you just need to walk really fast so you can get to Larimer (about 3 blocks SW of Union Station) and back before the train leaves without you. -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of [email protected] Sent: Thursday, March 28, 2013 9:43 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [Bikies] Denver: bike boxes and more http://yourhub.denverpost.com/denver/new-denver-bike-path-changes-lanes/6zWEc4dgCFd1tTmLaMgaxM-story _______________________________________________ Bikies mailing list [email protected] http://lists.danenet.org/listinfo.cgi/bikies-danenet.org _______________________________________________ Bikies mailing list [email protected] http://lists.danenet.org/listinfo.cgi/bikies-danenet.org
