That said, once a car isn't needed for day-to-day life in multiple neighborhoods in a city, and likewise once relaxed parking space requirements make it such that keeping a rarely-used car isn't trivially easy, (and especially an economy where reliable used cars have become far more valuable and unnecessary line-items in the budget might be quickly removed) the economics for young adults tilt pretty heavily toward tossing in gas money to with your car-owning friends or renting a car for $100 every few weekends when desiring a trip to the mountains. And urban families might become one-used-car-kept-for-10+-years families as opposed to one-car-per-adult families.
My understanding is also that Denver has a pretty-decent network of bike trails and a relatively-mild climate, which also means two-to-five mile trips can be pretty easily covered without a car.
Of course Denver won't become New York— but it stands a chance of becoming less of an auto-required city and more like the DC area, which is a relatively young metro area for the East Coast with a mass transit system from the modern era and new urban nodes at outer transit stops, and many people still own cars but plenty don't, especially in the urban core.
That said, once a car isn't needed for day-to-day life in multiple neighborhoods in a city, and likewise once relaxed parking space requirements make it such that keeping a rarely-used car isn't trivially easy, (and especially an economy where reliable used cars have become far more valuable and unnecessary line-items in the budget might be quickly removed) the economics for young adults tilt pretty heavily toward tossing in gas money to with your car-owning friends or renting a car for $100 every few weekends when desiring a trip to the mountains. And urban families might become one-used-car-kept-for-10+-years families as opposed to one-car-per-adult families.
My understanding is also that Denver has a pretty-decent network of bike trails and a relatively-mild climate, which also means two-to-five mile trips can be pretty easily covered without a car.
Of course Denver won't become New York— but it stands a chance of becoming less of an auto-required city and more like the DC area, which is a relatively young metro area for the East Coast with a mass transit system from the modern era and new urban nodes at outer transit stops, and many people still own cars but plenty don't, especially in the urban core.