Never mind your guns, some Denver City Councilmembers are coming for your gas stations.
The Denver Post reports that, concerned by an alleged “sudden proliferation of gas stations,” Councilmembers Amanda Sawyer and Paul Kashmann, among others, have decided that gas stations – apparently uniquely among Denver’s many retail businesses – are taking too much space away from other priorities such as housing. In response to this deadly threat to housing density, they are close to proposing a zoning change precluding new gas stations from being built inside a quarter-mile buffer zone around existing stations.
It would also preclude gas stations around light-rail stations. The reason given is that they’d prefer housing be built there, but I think they just don’t want the competition.
What sudden proliferation?
This isn’t the first time the anti-car central planners have sideswiped the city’s drivers. The transit-and-density powers that be, having manifestly failed to persuade people to abandon their cars – as they have failed nearly everywhere – have a history of attacking car infrastructure instead. Back in 2020, Denver’s Regional Transportation District (RTD) took advantage of the pandemic to argue that parking spaces were wasted space where housing could go.
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How large is this “sudden proliferation?” According to a council staff report, it amounts to 10 new stations in the city, bringing the total number of operating retail gas stations to 180, less than a 6% increase. The presentation doesn’t say if this is an actual trend, a recent spurt, or how many of those (if any) are replacing stations that have closed. The report claims 318 permanently closed retail gas stations in Denver, or 77% more than the total now operating.
The report has maps of the operating stations (figure 1) and the closed ones (figure 2), and it’s striking how similar the location patterns are. In some cases, open stations are in virtually, or even exactly, the same locations as closed ones, indicating modernization rather than growth.
Sawyer is quoted as objecting to the number of gas stations on East Evans Ave., stretching east from I-25, but there’s a reason for that. Evans is a major surface street that serves as an important morning and afternoon commute conduit from and to I-25. People are likely to want to fill up before getting onto the interstate, or when coming home.
Her objections to gas stations are somewhat ironic, given that her own Council District 5 serves as gasoline desert, with only two stations not bordering other districts, meaning that those low on gas already have longer drives to fill up.
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One can actually argue that Denver doesn’t have enough gas stations in certain places. A few years ago, for an article at a different outlet, I drove along Josephine north and York south, between I-70 and 6th Avenue, and discovered that there were no gas stations on this stretch of a major surface street.
The Post article features a photo of a station that just opened on the northwest corner of Monaco & Evans, perhaps one of the new stations that piqued Sawyer’s ire. It’s on a corner I drive by all the time. If Sawyer has a problem with that, then it comes at the expense of southbound commuters who would have to make it to and back from a station on the southeast corner. Monaco is 5 lanes and Evans is 4 lanes and it’s pretty busy during rush hour. Woe to the southbound commuter who wants to travel west after he tanks up.
Unstated is that the right behind the pre-existing station at Evans and Monaco is a new housing complex replacing an old K-Mart. It has apparently never occurred to these central planners that people moving to in will bring their cars with them. When they want to fuel up, the Conoco station will be the most convenient option, and in the absence of other alternatives, they’ll sit in line, idling their engines and fouling the air while they wait.
Kashmann doesn’t know best
The staff report also includes a map showing poor air quality allegedly correlating with high gas station density. In reality, it tells us only that gas stations go where the cars are.
The report’s list of stakeholders that staff consulted is telling; it includes four government agencies and the Colorado Wyoming Petroleum Marketers Association. The Colorado Auto Dealers Association and the American Automobile Association (AAA) – presumably proxies for the overwhelming bulk of the population who actually drive their cars around town – are listed as “future stakeholders.”
If the city were to duplicate Louisville’s ban on new gas stations at the same per capita number, staff says that Denver would be limited to 215 stations, 20% more than we have now, and with room for 3 times the number of new stations that has caused the current panic.
Councilman Kashmann says that the city is allowing gas stations that “people don’t want and we don’t need.” Except that nobody appointed Paul Kashmann the arbiter of what businesses the city needs, and that apparently people do both want and need them, given that there are enough gas purchases – even before the desired increased density – to keep them all in business.
Rather than telling us that we need to get used to more difficult and inconvenient driving, and higher gas prices from reduced competition, perhaps someone should tell these city council members to get used to the idea that most people love their cars, and that it’s not their job to decide how many gas stations the city “needs.”
Joshua Sharf is a Denver resident and a regular contributor to Complete Colorado.
