Beltways bring ‘edge cities’

BROOMFIELD – With any beltway comes questions of its impact: Do beltways produce sprawl? Or do they ease congestion?

One prediction with some certainty is that the Northwest Parkway will affect the land surrounding access points, such as the 96th Street Interchange and U.S. 36, U.S. 287 and Interstate 25.

Because Interlocken business park, which eventually may be home to 20,000 to 25,000 workers, and its adjacent development are expanding at the intersection of the Northwest Parkway and U.S. 36, considered a spoke out of the urban center, some would say the area has the beginnings of an “edge city.”

Edge cities routinely grow at the intersections of roads that spoke out of major metro areas and their surrounding beltways – usually on land that sat undeveloped as late as the ’70s and ’80s. They are perceived as a single place regionally and have a population dominated by white-collar workers – the key is at least 24,000 jobs. Cities with beltways that led to edge cities are, for example, Boston, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston and Washington, D.C.

Joel Garreau, a Washington Post reporter who authored the book “Edge City,” says cities are shaped by transportation. If roads aren’t built, odds are growth will not occur. Pittsburgh, for example, is the only sizable metropolitan area in the United States without a beltway. As a result, most development has occurred or still exists downtown; the growth of edge cities was stunted, and the market share for downtown is much higher than any city with a beltway.

“But here’s the problem,” Garreau says, “there’s been no growth for 40 years. So the downtown has a high market share of nothing, of no growth.”

The result of ignoring the automobile is predictable in other ways: You can’t drive very easily in the Pittsburgh area without going through downtown. “The result is astonishing traffic jams,” he says.

When beltways were first constructed in the ’50s, Americans thought they would be traversing cow pastures forever, he says. As middle- and upper-class Americans headed out of the city, jobs moved as close as possible to their homes. Developers looking for great locations saw the intersection of the radial road and the beltway. “Are there a quarter of a million people living within 10 minutes of this intersection? If the answer is yes, that flashes all sorts of lights at them.”

But, he notes, nowhere is it written that all such intersections become edge cities.

Interlocken’s Jim Long, a strong parkway proponent, doesn’t think Interlocken is an edge city. But neither does he say edge cities are of concern. “What we would like to do is make sure that the transportation system can maintain a 20-minute commute as opposed to a 45-minute commute. So I see residential development centering around the employment hub and the retail hub.”

Long says such hubs divert traffic that otherwise would continue to another destination. The perfect transportation system, he says, would be mass transit connecting centers, including the central business district. That’s why Broomfield will continue to support the largest park-n-Ride facilities in the district.

Long says it would be difficult to find an intersection of such strategic value as 96th Street that’s not developed, but that the difference between the area and other such intersections is open space, park-n-Rides and low-density development. “To me, that’s just real good planning on the part of Broomfield,” he says. “I see it as a model. I don’t think it’s something to be concerned about.”

Edge cities typically occurred in areas well removed – out on the edge – from urban areas where there was a large supply of low-cost land, notes Kirk Oglesby of the city of Broomfield: “This isn’t so much on the edge of Denver as it is between Denver and Boulder.” He says the area will never be like south I-25. “We’ll never approach that type of scale,” he says. “And I think the cities as well as the Boulder County commissioners get a lot of credit for putting that vision into place prior to the development pressures.”

Although pleased with the land use planning done for the Northwest Parkway, Boulder County Commissioner Ron Stewart says he is opposed to beltways in general: “What Colorado will experience is the kind of sprawl generally associated with a beltway.”

on Facebook on LinkedIn