Chances are, if you’re fond of traveling you’ve probably wondered why high-speed trains have existed in Europe and Asia for years, yet they’re non-existent here in the United States.
But the reality of a high-speed rail network is edging closer and closer. As Gizmodo reports, cities have already begun planning — and in some cases, already building — new stations in five cities across America. These stations will combine the old elegance of train travel with lightning fast speed — with the hope that in the future, these trains will be well used by passengers.
This year, Union Station in Los Angeles celebrates its 75th anniversary and with it comes a redesign. The plan includes stations for buses and trains plus a new subway system as well as bus, bike and pedestrian connections. Designed by Grimshaw Architects and Gruen Associates, the design also includes a high-speed rail terminal, as well as hotel and office towers, park land and better access to the neighborhoods surrounding the station and the nearby L.A. River.
Already under construction, the Transbay Terminal in San Francisco is going to be replaced by the new Transbay Transit Center — combining access to the Bay Area’s transit, including BART, Muni, and Caltrain, as well as accommodations for Amtrak trains and a possible high-speed rail. Cesar Pelli designed the new station — complete with a 5.4 acre public park on the roof — all of which are scheduled to open in 2017.
MORE: Thanks to Uncle Sam, Our Trains Are Finally Getting a Sweet Upgrade
Now that Denver’s new train station is complete, the Mile High city’s historic 1914 Union Station will become an area for shopping, restaurants and a boutique hotel. In turn, all modes of transit have been consolidated into this newly-designed spot, which also has room for offices and public space — all designed by SOM.
Down south, the first privately financed and run rail network in the U.S., All Aboard Florida, is invigorating its existing 235-mile railway, with plans to complete it by 2016. The train runs from Orlando to South Florida, ending in the brand-new hub designed by SOM that is planned for downtown Miami. Shopping and entertainment, plus a 80-story tower, will all be included in the complex.
Finally, Anaheim’s Regional Transportation Intermodal Center will open later this year, looking like a “translucent, glowing balloon” thanks to the ETFE polymer pillows. While the the improved local rail and bus connections help Orange County now, there are high hopes for California’s high-speed rail to begin here.
Tag: denver
These Towns Show What Even Temporary Urban Renewal Can Bring
Have you ever passed by an uninspiring stretch of your city and thought, ‘What this place needs is a beer garden?’
The citizens of several cities in Colorado did, and now they’re taking urban renewal into their own hands, creating temporary spruce-ups of blighted areas to show what is possible — and perhaps inspire permanent changes in the future. In Golden, community members zeroed in on a couple of blocks of a street named Miners Alley. That particular stretch was just steps away from downtown, but the spaces weren’t being put to any inspiring use. As Colleen O’Connor writes for the Denver Post, the street is “mostly used for deliveries to businesses that front bustling Washington Avenue.” But during the first weekend of June, citizens threw a street party called Better Block Golden there.
The volunteer-run event featured a pop-up beer garden, bands, art projects for kids, new landscaping, a vibrant Aspen tree mural, café seating and plenty to eat and drink. “If we like it, we can start making some permanent changes,” Golden’s Mayor Marjorie Sloan told O’Connor.
The project was inspired by The Better Block, a website that tracks and encourages such local improvements to urban landscapes across the country and around the world. Elsewhere, Street Plans Collaborative, an urban planning firm, offers a free guide on how to pull off quick city transformations like “guerilla gardening” and “pavement-to-parks” on its website.
Several other Colorado cities are getting in on the block-improvement movement, including Colorado Springs, where the group Colorado Springs Urban Intervention is hanging signs pointing the way for pedestrians to find easy and safe urban places to walk. They also transformed an ill-used block into the site of Curbside Cuisine, a gathering of food trucks.
“We wanted to change the dialogue on Colorado Springs,” co-founder of Colorado Spring Urban Intervention John Olson told O’Connor. “Instead of dreaming about things, let’s do it. Stop the chatter, and show that it will work. We heard too many times that Colorado Springs isn’t Portland, and it won’t work. But it’s doing fantastic.”
So the next time you walk past a blighted block, don’t be surprised by the transformations yet to come.
MORE: Cycling Tourism Has the Potential to Transform this Hardscrabble New Mexico Town
You Won’t Believe the Surprising New Uses for Old Shipping Containers
Excess shipping containers are a big problem — literally. According to Jason Blevins of the Denver Post, there are 34.5 million of them in the world. Shipping companies use each one for a decade or two, then the hulking steel boxes are destined to spend eternity in a landfill.
But more people are starting to rethink what these containers could be used for, including Rhino Cubed, founded by businesswoman Jan Burton and Sam Austin, an architect who specializes in using reclaimed materials. Launched on Earth Day in Louisville, Colorado, Rhino Cubed builds small, artful homes out of discarded shipping containers.
The company offers three models of 160-square foot shipping container homes, including a $60,000 deluxe version that contains art and metalwork and two less expensive styles with added flooring, doors, and walls. Environmentally-friendly aspects of the tiny houses include solar panels that generate energy for a refrigerator and a water tank to catch rainwater.
“We really wanted to create something that would work off-the-grid,” Burton told the Denver Post. “I like to think we can preserve Mother Nature while still living in the middle of it.”
Another Colorado project making use of old shipping containers is the 25th & Larimer building, which opened in Denver last November. The development was created out of 29 repurposed steel shipping containers, and its first tenant was Topo Designs, a company known for its rugged rucksacks and backpacks that are manufactured in the Rocky Mountain state to ensure factory worker safety. Jedd Rose of Topo Designs told Ricardo Baca of the Denver Post, “It fits within our ethos, because it’s simple. Shipping containers are already out there. You can reuse them. They’re modular. It’s such a great idea.”
With shipping container projects recently built everywhere from London to Las Vegas, it sounds like the global backlog of these steel boxes is starting to ease.
MORE: Lettuce Think Differently About Farming in Cities
Remembering a Remarkable Woman Who Raised $1 Million for Charity
The Denver community is mourning ultra-distance runner Essie Garrett, a formidable force for good as an educator and a charity fundraiser who died April 1 at age 74.
According to the Denver Post, Garrett was born in Texas, and at age 16, she joined the Army, serving for three years before she moved to Denver. Around that time, she began to follow Sri Chinmoy, an Indian spiritual leader who taught his followers that they can achieve enlightenment through the discipline of exercise. She took his teachings to heart and then some.
At the Emily Griffith Opportunity School, a Denver public technical college and alternative high school that has served thousands of low-income and minority students since its founding in 1916, Garrett taught refrigeration mechanics to mostly male classes full of students — some of whom were surprised to learn a woman knew so much about electronics. (She worked as a teacher until her retirement in 2010.) During this time, Garrett began to run distances unfathomable to most.
Garrett ran to raise money for a variety of charities, including Children’s Hospital Colorado, Colorado AIDS Project, Max Funds Animal Adoption, multiple-sclerosis research institutions, and the Denver Rescue Mission that serves the homeless. Starting on Thanksgiving in 1991, she began an annual tradition of running around Colorado’s Capitol building for 48 hours to raise money for the homeless. According to Claire Martin of the Denver Post, she often told friends complaining of hunger, “Don’t you ever say you’re starving. An appetite is not the same thing as starving.”
Essie Garrett ran more than 25,000 miles, raising more than $1 million for charities between 1981 to 2012. Chris Millius, her colleague at Emily Griffith Opportunity School said, “She was always coming up with different ideas for fundraising.”
The sight of Essie, her long dreadlocks gathered into a ponytail that bounced as she ran, will be missed around Denver’s City Park — but her contributions to charities will be long remembered.
MORE: Hundreds Trek the Boston Marathon Route to Raise Suicide Awareness
Brewers Fight Proposed Regulation That Would End Grain Recycling Initiatives
If you’re a lover of the brewsky, then Denver is the city for you.
The Mile High city brews more beer than any other American city, and the state of Colorado boasts over 140 microbreweries. So it probably won’t surprise beer lovers here in the “Napa of beer” that many brewers are using their drinks as forces for environmental and economic good, donating their spent grains — barley, hops, wheat and other grains that have been soaked in water during the beer-brewing process — to farmers who can use them to feed their livestock, instead of throwing them away.
Oskar Blues, a Longmont-based brewery, runs the Hops and Heifers program. In a process it calls “Farm to Cup,” the brewery grows hops on its own farm, uses the hops for brewing, feeds its cattle with the spent grains, and then uses the meat from these cows in burgers sold at its restaurant.
But newly proposed FDA rules threaten to disrupt innovative recycling programs such as this, forcing microbreweries to send the spent grains to landfills or else engage in a costly process of drying out the grains and packaging them to prevent anyone from touching them before they reach the farmers. For many small brewers, the cost of this would be too great and they’d be forced to choose the landfill option.
According to John Fryar of the Longmont Times-Call, Paul Gatza, who directs the Boulder-based 20,000-member strong Brewers Association, spoke with FDA officials who say they’ll change the rule before issuing new draft of the regulations this summer. “The wording in the original proposed rules was pretty bad,” Gatza said. He estimates that the new rule would cost breweries $5 more per barrel to process the grains before donating or selling them to farmers, potentially putting many small brewers out of the recycling business. That would have been a shame, as a recent Brewers Association survey found that members reuse 90 percent of their spent grains.
FDA spokeswoman Juli Putnam told Fryar that they’ve gone back to the drawing board, rewriting some of the language in the regulation in a way that will hopefully allow this beer positivity cycle to continue. Now that’s good news worth lifting a beer over.
MORE: His Family Lost its Farm. Now He’s Making Sure No One Else in His Community Suffers the Same Fate.
No Longer Afraid: A Young Immigrant Victim of the Aurora Theater Shootings Steps Out of the Shadows
The violence onscreen became real life for those victims of the horrific mass shooting at the Century 16 multiplex in Aurora, Colorado back in July 2012. And for one of the wounded, the terror of the event extended beyond being injured.
As 18-year-old Alejandra Lamas lay bleeding from a gunshot wound, she worried that if she accepted medical attention, someone would discover her immigration status and if so, if she and her family would be deported. For weeks as Lamas recovered, she was afraid that the media attention to the shooting — in which 12 people died, including Alejandra’s friend, A.J. Boik — would reveal that she had been brought to this country illegally as a child.
Lamas knew that just a month before the shootings, President Obama had issued a memo authorizing deferred action on immigration charges for people like her who had been in the country since they were kids. So she continued her physical therapy and decided to head to Colorado State University as planned, despite not knowing if she’d be able to work in this country after she graduated. “I knew that my options were really limited,” she told Laura Bond of Westword, “but I had a determination to go to school, regardless of what that would mean for me financially in the future.” She was, after all, going to be the first member of her family to attend college.
Lamas contacted immigration rights groups and lawyers she felt she could trust, and learned that she could qualify for a U Visa “for victims of crimes who have suffered substantial mental or physical abuse and are willing to assist law enforcement and government officials in the investigation or prosecution of the criminal activity,” according to the Homeland Security website. Because of the trauma her family suffered, her parents and younger sister qualified for visas too, which all of them received last year.
Denver playwright and director Antonio Mercado asked Lamas if he could include her story as the opening of his new production, “Dreaming Sin Fronteras” (“Dreaming Without Borders”), which features dramatic monologues about people like Lamas who are waiting in the shadows for the long-deferred DREAM Act (which would allow for citizenship for people brought to this country as children) to be passed. Mercado told John Wenzel of the Denver Post that he found Lamas’s story striking because “she was trying to convince the paramedics not to take her to the hospital, despite the fact that she had been shot.” Lamas, who finally feels free to share her story, agreed to participate in the show.
Lamas, 20, is in her second year in college studying social work. She now pays lower tuition since last year, Colorado passed a law allowing for in-state tuition for non-citizens. “Before all this happened, I was so caught up in being ashamed of being an immigrant,” she told Bond. But now, “When I go out now, people ask me, ‘Can I see your ID?’ I’m like, ‘Why, yes, you can!” Hopefully when people learn of stories like Lamas’s, more will be convinced that the time for immigration reform is now.
MORE: Tired of Waiting for Immigration Reform, One Man is Giving Undocumented Students a Shot at the American Dream
When It Comes to Fostering Civic Engagement, Nothing Beats a Newspaper
As the Internet becomes more omnipresent in people’s lives, newspapers have been declining — losing ad revenue and readership, and in the case of several major publications, disappearing altogether. But besides forcing citizens of these communities to get their news fix digitally rather than the old-fashioned way, what effect does the loss of the broadsheet have? A study suggests that it causes citizens to become less engaged.
In the study “Dead Newspapers and Citizens’ Civic Engagement,” published in the journal Political Communication, Lee Shaker of Portland State University analyzed the civic engagement data in the 2008 and 2009 Current Population Survey to see what happened in Seattle when its Post-Intelligencer became an online-only publication in 2009, and in Denver when its Rocky Mountain News eased publication completely in 2009. Shaker studied civic engagement as measured through such activities as participating in local groups like PTAs and neighborhood watch committees, contacting elected officials, and buying or boycotting certain products because of the values their companies espouse. He found significant declines in several of these areas in Denver and Seattle compared to 16 other cities that maintained their newspapers during the same period.
Shaker concludes, “The advent of new communication opportunities suggests that new forms of engagement will also develop. Thus far, there are many questions about the importance of place online: why should any one place matter when we may all be virtual and interconnected? And yet, our society is still geographically organized and governed. Ultimately, if we desire healthy and productive democratic communities, then the provisioning of local news — which helps tie citizens to each other and their communities — must continue.”
The New York Times, Gawker, and Salon aren’t going to report on the city council meetings in your town, which may be one reason why some digital titans have begun propping up the old-fashioned news source. So while the newspaper may be a shopworn institution, it provides a service to democracy that no other entity can so far replace.
MORE: What Are All Those Teens Doing On Their Phones? Learning About Politics, Apparently.
Thriving Gardens Now Grow in a Denver Food Desert
After graduating from the University of Denver in 2007, pals Joseph Teipel and Eric Kornacki headed south, to Guatemala where they participated in a service project.
Inspired by the work they did there, the two returned home to help poor communities here in the United States. Their goal is a lofty one: They want to foster self-sufficient communities nationwide that grow their own healthy food. But for now, they’re starting small by making a difference in one city.
In 2009, Teipel and Kornacki formed the non-profit, Re:Vision, and launched their first program, Re:Farm, to help low-income people living in a food desert in southwest Denver. Their first project included planting a school garden at Kepner Middle School, designing irrigated backyard gardens for seven families, teaching families how to grow their own food, and mentoring at-risk middle schoolers through gardening. In 2010, their work was rewarded with an $80,000 grant from the National Convergence Partnership to study how gardening can be used to prevent violence and implement programs. From there, they began hiring community promotoras to spread the word about healthy food and teach other people in their neighborhood how to garden.
Much like the gardens themselves, Re:Vision is growing. Last season, 200 families participated in the backyard garden program, producing 28,000 pounds of fruits and vegetables. A hundred families are on a waiting list for a garden, and the organization hopes to meet that demand this year, with the help of a $50,000 Slow Money Entrepreneur of the Year award and a $300,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
They’re also launching a program called “Dig it Forward,” through which people who want to help can hire Re:Vision workers to design and plant gardens. The proceeds from these garden sales will pay for free gardens in low-income people’s yards. Taipel told Helen Hu of North Denver Tribune, “It’s a way of thinking outside the box. We have a lot of expertise, and if people want to start gardens and help others, it’s a win-win.”
Patricia Grado, an immigrant from Chihuahua, Mexico, serves as one of the promatoras, told Hu, “I’ve reaffirmed my understanding about how to grow our own food, about food sustainability, nutrition, and among other things, how to help the community with my knowledge.”
MORE: This Innovative Idea Brings Produce Directly to Low-Income Communities
Homelessness Didn’t Stop the Music From This Teenager
Whether it’s jazz, hip hop, or classical, music has the ability to lift a person’s mood. Seventeen year old Dominic Ellerbee, of Denver, Colorado, found that to be the truth when his family hit hard times.
Last year, Dominic was forced to live in a minivan with his mother, Madonna, and his little sister Dejaune. But Dominic had a creative outlet that enabled him to keep his spirits up: He’s a multi-instrumentalist and composer making a name for himself in the Mile High music community by playing and starring in the Denver Public Schools’ Citywide Honor Band.
Dominic, who plays the six-string bass guitar, acoustic and electric guitars, drums, the piano, the vibraphone and the recorder, also writes music for his school’s drum line and gives music lessons to other students. Of his difficult life, he told Alison Noon of the Denver Post, “It was hard sometimes, but it never really got to me because I had music and stuff.”
For months now, Dominic has moved from house to house, staying with friends and family members. But he expects his transitory life to become more settled now that his mother has found a job and they plan to move into an apartment this month. Meanwhile, he’s writing an original musical that, if completed, the school director at Denver South promised to stage next year.
Our guess is this young musical talent can finish anything he tries.
MORE: Teenage Scientist Invents Nuclear Devices for a Safer World
Teaching Low-Income Youth These Skills May Just Solve the Tech Job Hiring Gap
Jeff Macco, co-founder of Denver mobile app startup AppIt Ventures, was trying to hire a junior developer in 2012—a process that ultimately took six weeks. Frustrated by this time-consuming search for an employee, Macco began to wonder if it was possible to train more people with the technology skills companies are seeking most today. In 2013, only 58.8% of the students in the Denver Public Schools graduated on time, within four years. So after Macco left AppIt Ventures last year, he started SeedPaths, aiming to train some of these students who hadn’t been able to follow the standard educational path because of obstacles in their personal lives for careers in technology.
SeedPaths classes are currently open to low-income students aged 16 to 21 who have experienced some barriers to their education, such as homelessness or learning disabilities. “We found a unique funding source in the federal government that was targeted toward this demographic of students,” Macco told Andy Vuong of the Denver Post. The $6000 tuition for the first 13 students was covered by money from the federal Workforce Investment Act. In addition to teaching them skills such as HTML and JavaScript, SeedPaths also provides support that low-income students might need to complete training, such as free lunch and bus passes, and works to set its graduates up with internships and job opportunities.
The first group of students includes Joel Azoulay, who was homeless during high school and ended up earning a GED, and 18-year-old Diego Conde, who has lived in five foster homes since his mother’s death from cancer in 2008. “What’s so great about the program is that they have not only taught me about the tech industry, but also the professionalism part of it, involving high energy and intellectual curiosity,” Conde told Vuong. “It’s just a variety of things that I had never learned or nobody ever taught me while being in the child welfare system.”
SeedPaths plans to expand its course offerings for students who don’t qualify for low-income federal support soon, helping more people find good jobs and solving the tech hiring problem at the same time.
Every Kid Needs An Internet Connection to Thrive in School. This District Has A Plan to Make it Happen.