CMAP - Land Use
This is the focus area for you if you want to explore these questions:
- How do our land use decisions impact our energy use and emissions?
- How can we design communities to reduce consumption of all resources?
Topics might include:
- How we use and build on our land
- How this topic area fits into the Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan
Checkout these slides presented at the launch event, and keep scrolling to share your ideas. You can also download them in Spanish.
-
Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Linkedin Email this link
What big ideas (think systems change) should we as a community explore to:
- Support climate-friendly land use, including development and siting of renewable energy infrastructure
View All Ideasover 4 years ago
Reduce car emissions by changing zoning laws to allow more people to live in boulder!
We have created a system where we do not allow people to build out or up, or to densify. This creates housing scarcity and means we have way more people who work in boulder than live there. By forcing people to live in the suburbs we create an army of car commuters. The single biggest impact boulder could have on its environmental impact is to change zoning laws to enable more dense housing. Keep the green belt, keep the parks, keep the height limit even, just allow more density. Eliminate single family zoning and minimum lot sizes and simply make things residential or commercial. Interweave the commercial with the residential to create more complete communities and count mixed use as residential. This creates nicer communities, less pollution, less car travel and traffic, more public transportation use, and better, newer housing. Do we want to be a city with sky high rents to live in crappy houses that haven't been updated nice the 80's? Because that is our current reputation. Landlords have no motivation to update their rentals if there is no competition. It is essential too that this is done in all neighborhoods, including wealthy neighborhoods like Chautauqua and Mapleton hill. To reduce car travel we must have denser housing closer to downtown where the jobs are. It's also a moral issue:the wealthy shouldn't be exempt from sacrifices for the betterment of everyone. The rest of the state thinks we are hypocrites who claim to care about the environment but really only cares about housing values. Let's prove them wrong.
about 4 years ago
Support the Creation of Public Land Trusts
We need to adjust regulations to allow and support land trusts to make home ownership more accessible so more locals can have equity in Boulder and create stronger, stable neighborhoods.
about 4 years ago
BOULDER NEEDS BARRIER SEPARATED BIKE LANES - unsafe/inadequate infrastructure results in people driving instead, WHITE LINES DONT SAVE LIVES
Bikers do not feel safe smooshed between white line and a curb where they are riding over gravel, glass, and trash, and avoiding cars pulling out of dirveways/sidestreets while cars whizz past them a few feet to their left. I have been hit TWICE in a bike lane. If there was a barrier, I would not have been hit. The number one reason people refrain from biking is concern with their own safety. Less than 40% of people report feeling safe in standard bike lanes, but greater than 87% reported feeling safe in a barrier separated bike lane. Adding a barrier to the bike lane reduces the number of accidents by 90%. These concerns impact women ridership even more than men, preventing women from accessing their destinations on bike.
about 4 years ago
Ecopass For All
Since transportation seems to fall under land use in the CMAP, I think making public transportation truly public should be highlighted here. Can we start with an estimate of what it would cost? Can people agree on a figure that its worth? Right now a pass is prohibitively expensive and the neighborhood ecopass system is hard to pull off. We have a pretty good route system in place, let's use it more.
almost 4 years ago
Concrete
Keep trails, parking lots and spaces dirt or roadbase. Concrete production contributes 20% of thw world emissions. Keep trails dirt and roadbase so that we can minimize our contribution in this way, while having the nice side effect of keeping trails with a natural rural feel.
Learn More
