a response to our ex-City Councilman, Boulder Daily Camera 4/10/04

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Counterpunch 11/6/01

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by Evan Ravitz, founder, Vote.org
Published 11/25/2000 in the Boulder Daily Camera

When I directed Boulder, Colorado’s Voting by Phone ballot initiative campaign in 1993 I learned many unnerving things about existing voting procedures. The problems revealed in Florida are just the beginning:

1. The Voter News Service (formerly News Election Service) -which supplies ALL election-eve numbers on national and Congressional races- is a private business of the TV networks, The New York Times, the Washington Post and the Associated Press. If you ask them how they count votes and predict outcomes they say that’s proprietary information! They have no web site or other public profile.
2. Most votes in America are counted by computer programs which are also proprietary secrets. Not even election officials are allowed to inspect these programs (the “source code”) to verify their accuracy. Election officials can test the programs (using “test decks”) but any clever programmer can write a program which passes tests but falsifies the election.
3. In most jurisdictions, identification for voting is on the honor system. Signatures, if taken, are not compared to your signature on file in most places unless you are “challenged” by election judges or poll watchers, a rare event. When this system started hundreds of years ago, the election judges or poll watchers knew most everyone in their precincts. In modern America, this is rarely true.
4. Mail or absentee ballots are often delivered to old addresses, and the USPS is not supposed to forward them. Whoever gets one could fill it out in the rightful voter’s name. This is discussed in the document “Florida Voter Fraud Issues” from the Florida Department Of Law Enforcement. In student and other high-turnover areas, this problem is rife.
5. In states with “early” voting, there is no system to prevent people from voting early at an elections office and then also voting at their precinct.

You can verify all these points by calling your County elections office. These and other problems leave our voting system wide open to various frauds. The 1992 book Votescam: The Stealing of America, gives ample evidence of widespread voting fraud for decades. See Votescam.com.

Voting by Phone, used successfully in the National Science Foundation’s 1974-5 Televote project, is a good solution to these problems, using PIN numbers which have protected our bank accounts for decades. This would also make voting much easier for single parents and those who work several jobs, and much cheaper and less wasteful of paper, gasoline, etc. Please see our paper on Security and Privacy. Now, web voting can be integrated with phone voting to make it easy for everyone on both sides of the “digital divide.” The Arizona Democratic Party had great success with web voting last March. Turnout increased 622%!

Even better is what else this technology can be used for. Please see our web site at Vote.org. Vote.org is now an affiliate of Philadelphia II, a national organization led by former US Senator Mike Gravel. Our site is used in a Houghton-Mifflin college textbook and a Duke University course -see the site bottom.

by Evan Ravitz
published in the Boulder Daily Camera, 4/29/2000

When Ramsey case lead investigators Det. Tom Wickman and Det. Tom Trujillo interviewed myself and Robert McFarland, MD, co-founder of Boulder’s Parenting Place for an hour at my home last May 5, Detective Wickman remarked “Nothing is what it seems in this case.” Here are several examples that have not received media coverage, yet:

DA Alex Hunter concluded his recent retirement statement by saying, regarding the Ramsey case: “I believe most people feel their district attorney has done right by the law.” Mr. Hunter did not say he followed the law, only that people think he did. He did not follow this law:

Colorado Revised Statute 16-5-204 (l) states “Any person may approach the prosecuting attorney or the grand jury and request to testify or retestify in an inquiry before a grand jury or to appear before a grand jury.” Dr. McFarland and I, after discovering that Dr. McFarland’s mailings to the jury foreman had been intercepted, sent material directly to jury members at their homes on June 28. For thus exercising our right under Colorado law to “approach” our fellow citizens the grand jury, we were threatened with prosecution for Contempt of Court! And ridiculed by editor Hartman of the Boulder Daily Camera.

It was not until September 23rd that I read the above law myself. The Colorado ACLU Intake Director told me on October 8 that they would take our case, although this was too late to be of use, with the grand jury about to disband. Perhaps there will be another. But valuable time has been lost. The Denver Post reported on 3/15/00 that Hunter also tried to keep his own investigator Lou Smit away from the grand jury until Smit sought a court order to enforce the above law!

Our evidence is similar to that which the woman from San Luis Obispo, California and her therapist have been giving Boulder police in recent weeks, featured in a long lead article (by editor Hartman) on February 25, and others since, relating to a pedophile ring having abused and killed JonBenet.

At Hunter’s press conference on October 14th, investigative journalist Joe Calhoun (who shares in an Academy award for the documentary The Panama Deception) asked why Dr. McFarland and I had been repeatedly prevented from contacting the grand jury, in spite of the law. Hunter replied that a judge’s order (Daniel Hale’s) forbade us, which seemed to satisfy the media. Yet, every lawyer knows that even judges and DAs must obey state laws. Why would these leaders of Boulder’s justice system deem it so important to keep us from the grand jury that they would repeatedly violate this law?

The substance of our testimony to the police and what we still want investigated is what it seems Hunter most wanted to avoid: the possibility that accused pedophiles in very high places in Boulder -we suggested two names- had both motive and means to de-rail the investigation in the first hours, possibly by calling off the FBI. The motive would be to keep the wide-ranging spotlight of a media case like this away from people like themselves, whether they were involved or not.

Normally, the FBI would immediately assume jurisdiction over an apparent kidnapping by “a small foreign faction” (so read the “ransom note”) of the child of a Defense contractor executive. (Lockheed-Martin owned Access Graphics.) Detective Linda Arndt has stated that she asked for the FBI and police backup before she even arrived at the Ramsey home and was told no. This left her unable to control a crime scene filled with suspects and their friends. When she repeated her request she was told everyone was in a meeting. Why would police administration repeatedly refuse to provide backup and FBI assistance in such circumstances?

[The camera edited out this paragraph:] “Tom Wickman made another curious comment to Dr. McFarland and I, and independently to Stephen Singular, author of “Presumed Guilty: An Investigation into the JonBenet Ramsey Case, the Media, and the Culture of Pornography” (on page 217). Tom said that once he was “getting close” to arresting a Boulder City Council member, but had been told to “back off.” Since Tom was legally prohibited from giving us any clues about the Ramsey investigation, I feel he was repeatedly drawing an analogy, by way of saying that he’d heard the pedophile-coverup story before and had been told to back off from investigating that.”

Hunter made a little Freudian slip under the pressure of the October 14 press conference, in the first 2 minutes. He referred to “grand secrecy,” apparently meaning to say “grand jury secrecy.” In this case the grand jury didn’t have to keep the secrets Dr. McFarland and I had to relate. Hunter and his assistants kept those secrets from the grand jury. They also prevented Cina Wong, Vice-President of the National Board of Document Examiners, from testifying. Why the “grand secrecy,” Mr. Hunter?

What makes the case important is not that JonBenet was cute and her parents rich, but what it says about the legal system in our town and beyond. My attorney David Lane calls it the “just us” system. You can read most of our documents and related material here.

By Evan Ravitz
Published in the Colorado Daily, 10/11/99

When I lived near Taos, NM in the mid-‘70s, the late David Monongye, Keeper of the Hopi Prophesy, stayed several times with the Kimmey family that I lived with. One of David’s prophesies was that the time of world “purification” that started a few years earlier would feature the “unmasking” of long-held secrets. (There is a web site with David’s 44 newsletters I just discovered, Techqua Ikachi: Land and Life, The Traditional Viewpoint, at http://www.geocities.com/RainForest/Canopy/5566/techqua.htm)

As the millennium turns, the masks are falling like flies, revealing the corruption of so many institutions. The corruption likely had long been there, but is now unmasked by things like the Freedom Of Information Act, Open Records and Open Meetings laws, the internet and “tapes.” We’ll talk a bit about two corrupt institutions: CU and the FBI. First, a hearty thanks to the new, resurrected Colorado Daily for having the guts to use these tools to reveal the truth, and to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” what newspapers should do.

Marge of TV’s Simpsons said it: “As long as everyone is videotaping everyone else, justice will be done.” Her creators refer, of course, to the video of LA cops beating Rodney King. Here we have 2 tapes: the ABC video showing CU Regents Chairman Peter Steinhauer getting physical with reporter Brian Hansen to keep him from questioning CU President Beuchner, and the Daily audiotape featuring Steinhauer and CU PR honcho Bob Nero pretending the meeting had already started so they could accuse Hansen of disrupting it, and evict him. The video gives the lie to Steinhauer’s letter to the Boulder Daily Camera which states that Hansen “pushed me.” I hope Hansen sues Steinhauer for defamation of character and CU for violations of his civil rights and the Open Meetings Law. I hope to see the video all over TV so people can see how power corrupts. Too bad tape wasn’t running when Steinhauer was heard by a Daily editor to introduce someone with “He’s a queer among fags.”

(Marge wasn’t quite right. Rodney King’s attackers were acquitted in their criminal trial. Then, after massive riots and arson in LA, King won his civil trial against them. CU students also learned that their 4th Amendment rights against illegal search and seizure weren’t respected until after the riots of May 3-5, 1997. )

CU has also been effectively hiding their huge human rights archives by not providing funding to preserve, organize and facilitate access. This would aid investigation and prosecution by the proposed World Criminal Court –which is now obstructed by the US government. Curator Bruce Montgomery told the Boulder Daily Camera (9/19/99, p.4A) that just as outside funds were being committed, “On the inside things were disintegrating, crumbling, and I have no reason why.”

Let me guess: CU wants to hide what the archives hold about crimes against humanity implicating CU’s corporate sponsors and investments with Shell Oil, Nike, Chevron, Peabody Coal -now sucking the Hopis’ water dry- etc. I’m sure CU contracts with these monsters include clauses prohibiting “disparaging” the corporations. Revealing information that Shell money and helicopters helped Nigeria’s dictatorship butcher whole villages would certainly “disparage” Shell, for example. I’d move that archive out of CU before the evidence gets shredded.

The FBI’s supposedly terminated COINTELPRO program is actually alive in spirit if not name, and actively harassing environmentalists who try to get the US to enforce our environmental laws. They refuse to investigate whether Vail torched its own buildings, even though most arsons are committed by owners. They refuse to file charges against a logger who killed protester David Chain by dropping a tree on him. They’re being investigated for their conduct in Waco, in Russia, and hopefully soon, here in Boulder:

The FBI apparently violated the “Lindbergh Law” by not taking immediate charge of the JonBenet Ramsey case in the first 7 hours or so when it appeared to be the kidnapping of a top Defense contractor’s daughter by foreign terrorists. The FBI and police backup that Detective Linda Arndt said she repeatedly asked for stayed away while lone Linda couldn’t control the crime scene, enabling John Ramsey to move and contaminate the body and his friends to tromp all over. This travesty has cost Boulder citizens $2 million, 2 ¾ years and the truth, so far. Who is powerful enough to call off the FBI? Why would they? Why does the DA, in rejecting applications by my friend Dr. Bob McFarland and myself to testify to the grand jury, say this radical breach of FBI duty is irrelevant? Email me, evan (at) vote.org, for a copy of my letter to the DA.(See our Ramsey page.)

One correction to Hansen: CU PR man David Grimm released the documents regarding the TLE that the Daily sued for not because he is “media-friendly” but “law-fearful” -of the Open Records law. (For this he was “redeployed.”) KGNU radio old-timers remember when then-general manager Grimm in 1981 shut down the station for “financial” reasons while checks up to $1000 sat in his desk uncashed. Volunteers worked like hell to rescue our community station from Grimm’s “friendliness.” Grimm was then rewarded with a high-paying job as “spokesman” for the City of Boulder, and now CU.

My predictions: “Our” dinosaur institutions will continue the masquerade. David Grimm will write CU fairy tales in the background, while new PR honcho Bob Nero will fiddle with the truth in the foreground. And more than half the graduates of the Journalism School will become not journalists, but PR people, better paid by far to keep the masks on than journalists are to remove them. As the millennium -and my stomach- turn.

By Evan Ravitz
Published in the Boulder Daily Camera 4/20/97

Boulder has a parking AND a congestion AND a safety AND an emergency response problem. Amory Lovins (credited with single-handedly convincing electrical utilities to fund conservation rather than build more generation capacity) says: “If you don’t understand how things are connected, the cause of problems is solutions.” Traffic circles -Boulder style- are merely the most dangerous and expensive “solutions” staff have given us. Let’s look at how things are connected to get the big picture:

City Council’s policy of creating congestion to get people out of their cars is a failure. The just-released “Modal Shift in the Boulder Valley 1990-1996” study shows that our “shift” out of single occupant vehicles ended in 1994 (p. 3). But Council’s congestion IS getting people off their bicycles: Cycling is now declining FAST, from a high of 13.8% of all trips in 1992 to 10.5% in 1996 (p. 2). We cyclists think it’s because of the increasing danger, and a comparison of cycling accident statistics by traffic engineer John Allen 3 years ago showed an accident rate 3 times as high here as the national average for cities our size. Yes, that does take into account our higher proportion of cyclists.

Busing -in spite of the HOP and the lion’s share of funds- increased from 1.9% to 3.3% also from 1992 to 1996.

A flaw in the study makes it LOOK like walking is the biggest success, accounting for 21.9% of trips. Because they define a trip as anything longer than 1 block (p. 50), every time you park more than 1 block from your destination your walk to and fro is counted as 2 trips on foot. This makes Boulder’s increasingly-distant-parking problem seem like a foot travel success! With the numbers for walking basically level (within the margin of error), one can see that real pollution-and-congestion-saving walking is actually decreasing like cycling, and for the same reason. It is often dangerous or unpleasantly threatening to travel in Boulder without heavy armor -a car or bus. The City’s obstructions don’t calm traffic but enrage drivers, who try to make up lost time by hard acceleration and braking.

Aspen, by moving to charge $1/hr. for parking (double Boulder’s rate) in January, 1995 has partly solved the REAL underlying problem: automobile over-use (unnecessary use) is subsidized by all of us. Bus use went up 33% in 5 weeks, parking is easy now, and congestion and pollution are noticeably down as people don’t circle looking for a parking spot (Denver Post, 2/13/95). Analysis (see below) shows Boulder’s parking to be fabulously subsidized (as is Aspen’s, still) , and now serves as a reward to drivers who have navigated the circles, bumps, red lights and congestion. We all pay higher prices because something like 1/4 of all our expensive city real estate is covered with empty cars and lots, which raises the cost of the remaining land. Downtown businesses must also raise their prices for all of us -including those who don’t park- to validate the “free” parking they subsidize through the CAGID tax district.

Boulder’s move to build another parking structure will temporarily ameliorate the worst symptoms, but will still be subsidized, and thus will continue to encourage auto over-use, as we outgrow the structure. In designing parking lots 2-300 square feet are allotted per car, to include backing space. For most office workers, this is a lot more space than their offices. Yet the cost is far less: $175 per quarter in the parking structures for 2-300 square feet. As office space that rents for about $1800 per quarter, according to downtown landlord Steve Tebo. And the structures cost about the same per square foot to construct as office buildings, according to Councilman Steve Pomerance.

When the City starts charging more of the real costs of parking, it will have plenty of money to fund real alternatives: frequent bus service on a real grid system (instead of the current “hub-and-spoke” system, which is really a slow hub-and-spaghetti system), a grid of bike paths and lanes, outlying parking lots, etc. Otherwise we will be subsidizing these largely-unused alternatives AND the over-use of cars. It needs to be done FAIRLY, proportional to land value, everywhere in the city. It should be phased in to give people time to change their habits. I’d suggest doubling the rates, letting people see if it works as it did in Aspen, then letting the citizens vote on doubling them again.

Instead of this ready-to-go system, Boulder is spending $800,000+ for the “Congestion Study” which, for years now, is looking at more expensive and invasive ways of accomplishing the same thing: toll booths or microchips in every car to track & charge for driving. It’s well past time for the City to stop addressing every symptom with studies, public relations and obstructionism and to stop subsidizing our worst problem. First, they MUST stop hypocritically giving away 150 parking spots to City employees for $.50-$1.00 a day (Boulder Planet 3/26 p.11).

If you agree with this, please call 440-6838 or email evan (at) vote.org. If we don’t “connect things” Boulder will continue to fall apart.

Guest Opinion published 12/4/96 in the Boulder Planet

I thank letter-writer C. Kliger, whose building lost resident parking on 13th St. when bike lanes were striped on last month for not taking the bait offered by Transportation Division to again divide neighbors against cyclists. We have a Division which takes the cake -about the same portion of the City budget as the Defense Department is of the Federal budget- by getting citizens to fight over crumbs.

The classic example of how The Division works is their multi-year promotion of traffic circles, which the Camera’s front page story of 10/30/96 says “have pitted neighbor against neighbor”:

In 1988, North 9th Street residents started asking for several 4-way stop signs to slow traffic. The Division said 4-ways wouldn’t work, although the one at Maxwell and 9th worked OK. Bolder Bicycle Commuters and most cyclists opposed the circles, medians and neckdowns the Division proposed, as these things violate national (AASHTO) and Boulder (Transportation Master Plan 1988, pg. 2-20) standards of 14-foot minimum lane widths for streets designated as bike routes. Many neighbors went for it since the Division refused them stop signs or raised crosswalks.

After 6 years and over $10,000 of studies, reports and acrimonious meetings, 9th Street got a circle, a median and a set of neckdowns, costing some $120,000. Some go the wrong way around the circle and accidents have increased. Last month 4-way stops were installed on 9th at Dellwood and Forest, finally solving the problem!! The “test” traffic circle at 17th & Pine is THE most dangerous intersection in town as measured by calls to the Close Call Hotline (441-4272). The test circle at 15th & Pine is 3rd worst. May these be the deathbed of the Division’s concrete chicanery, not of some child on foot or bicycle!

Bolder Bicycle Commuters members persuaded the Division NOT to stripe bike lanes on 13th from Balsam to Forest, thus preserving some 20 parking spots. There is little traffic north of Balsam on 13th and we don’t feel threatened there. (13th St. residents deserve the same resident parking as the better-organized -and politically connected- Mapleton Hill and Whittier neighborhoods they’re sandwiched between.)

Bolder Bicycle Commuters also persuaded the Division NOT to take parking for a bike lane on Sunnyside, a 2-block street immediately west of Broadway and south of baseline that is shared with the Broadway bike route, also because it is not needed. We were unable to convince the Division NOT to build the million-dollars-worth of tunnels under Mohawk and Gilpin.

It is sad that so much of Boulder’s business community buys into the image the Division creates of cyclists grabbing for every inch of turf. Let’s remember that Boulder has ONE good continuous E-W bike route (the Creek Path) and ONE decent continuous N-S bike route (Broadway-13th-15th-Broadway). While we fight over crumbs, the Division takes the cake as the biggest part of the bloated City bureaucracy. Ken Hotard of the Board of Realtors, also in the 11/13 Planet properly condemns City government for growing faster than the City. Our city government has 1,800 “full-time equivalent” employees, while Fort Collins with 10,000 more people has only 1,100! These extra employees of course vote for the City Council which pays them, Council hires more, and the vicious cycle keeps grinding away. This is like the council’s self-appointment process which citizens just ended at the polls, demanding to elect their own representatives by passing 2B.

The business community would be wise to join with environmentalists. If young, athletic, compact, sunny Boulder fulfilled its potential as a cycling town (biking for 25% of all trips like Davis, California or 40% like big, rainy Amsterdam, instead of our measly 12%), people would see that it is not primarily growth which makes our lives congested and polluted, but unnecessary over-use of vehicles. But the Division can’t build an empire on cycling. They are set on a wasteful “system” of tangled, weaving bus routes, which run emptier (an average of some 5.5 passengers on a 45-passenger bus) than single-passenger autos! Citizens voted against their $250-million Transit Tax 2-1 in 1994, but the parasitic Division is doing polls and focus-groups, honing their propaganda to wear us down.

The Division and City government as a whole slavishly re-enact what caused 18th-century philosopher Rousseau to observe: “Keeping citizens apart has become the first maxim of modern politics.”

Bolder Bicycle Commuters holds monthly public meetings and can be reached at 449-7439.

Read on KGNU’s Morning Magazine 5/16/96

This is Evan Ravitz, with Citywatch, a peak behind the hot-air curtain of the Imperial City of Boulder.

Citizens of Boulder and Beyond: your testimony can help prevent a multi-hundred-million-dollar fraud from being perpetrated on Boulder. It’s called the Transportation Master Plan, and you can comment on it tonite at the Planning Board Meeting at about 6:30 at City Hall. Next Tuesday City Council will have a public hearing on the TMP; watch for the agenda published in Sunday’s Camera.

The Master Plan is so perverse and parasitic that even the League of Women Voters is harshly critical of it. Over the next decades Transportation Division wants a good part of a billion dollars to continue their policies which are taking us straight to gridlock. There have been so many revisions of the TMP that I’ve given up trying to keep track of the details. The bottom line is that they want more.

Transportation Division spends about the same proportion of Boulder’s bloated budget as the Defense Department spends of the Nations. Last weekend they spent ¼ million ripping out the perfectly good intersection of Canyon and 13th St. and putting in concrete in pretty colors. The TMP will have them do this at 9th & Canyon and Broadway and Canyon as well.

They again ask for much more money for more big empty buses weaving slowly through our neighborhoods spewing diesel. The citizens turned this down 2 to 1 in 1994, but they’re baaack!

Nowhere is there an indication they intend to straighten out the routes and put them on main streets where they would be used.

They trumpet nationwide their HOP shuttle, but two studies show that 2/3 of HOP riders would otherwise walk or bicycle. Pedestrians and cyclists are the enemies of Transportation Division as there is no money in it.

A million dollars is to be spent putting 14 fancy traffic circles on Pine and Spruce East of Downtown. All this does is shift some traffic to Pearl and Balsam; a million dollar shell game. All these circles will violate the 1989 Transportation Master Plan which implemented National standards mandating that traffic lanes on Bike routes be at least 14 feet wide.

A real solution to traffic congestion, adopted with enormous success in Aspen, is to simply charge more for parking so people drive less and use buses, bikes or feet more. Transportation Division isn’t telling us about Aspen’s success, instead taking $800,000 to study the idea for 2 more years, meanwhile spending as much as possible on bandaid solutions.

Director of the Transportation Division Phil Weisbach and his employees deliberately and repeatedly lied in 1994. Responding to Sierra Club and other complaints that cycling would get nothing in that year’s plan, Weisbach said cycling wasn’t relevant because most cyclists wouldn’t ride more than a mile or 2. I reminded him that the Boulder Valley Employee Survey showed that the average bike commute is 3.6 miles, but he said he’d continue to assert his “opinion”.

The TMP is supposed to guide our transportation future for many years. If you think it’s time to show the parasites the door, come to the Planning Board meeting tonight at 6:30 and the Council meeting Tuesday about 7.

This has been Evan Ravitz with Citywatch.

by Evan Ravitz
published 4/13/96 in the Boulder Daily Camera

Newly appointed City Council member Don Mock says of the TMP in the Daily Camera “I think it’s a lofty goal to think that somehow we can freeze our traffic at 1994 levels.” Given the misleadership of Transportation Division, it’s not just lofty, it’s impossible. Now they are purposely ignoring the most cost-effective transportation success in Colorado in many years: Aspen, in January of 1995, ended free parking and started charging $1.00 per hour downtown, double the Boulder rate. According to the Denver Post and Aspen officials, within 5 weeks bus usage was up 32%, parking is easy to find, and pollution is visibly down as cars no longer search endlessly. The business community, which fought paid parking tooth and nail, is now pleased as punch.

Why is Transportation Division ignoring this success?

Because even after Aspen’s success, they obtained a $600,000 Federal grant and Council’s approval of $200,000 more of ours, for a two-year “Congestion Pricing” study, to determine whether charging drivers by how much they drove (or parked) is a good idea. Parking and driving are now tremendously subsidized by all taxpayers, no matter how much they drive. For decades, organizations like the Sierra Club have campaigned for higher gas taxes and insurance paid at the pump to more fairly charge those who drive more. Boulder can’t legally charge a gas tax, or change the insurance industry. But Boulder could start charging more of the true costs of parking next week, if Council had the intestinal fortitude.

They don’t yet. The main point of their recent distribution of 33,000 pieces of campaign material for the TMP, called a “survey”, is repeated 3 times in the 9 “Questions for the Community”: they want more money. A similar “aggressive transit” tax was defeated by the voters 2 to 1 in 1994.

The “lofty goal” of maintaining traffic at 1994 levels isn’t lofty enough if the City’s other goal of increasing “alternative” transportation is to be attained. Cycling -still 3 times as popular as the bus- has been decreasing since 1992 according to the “Modal Shift in the Boulder Valley” report. Commuting to work by bicycle decreased from 14.9% of all work trips to 12.3% by ’94. Commuting to school by bicycle decreased from 27.1% to 22.6%. Although Council member Havlick claimed in a Colorado Daily article that these decreases are insignificant, the report states: “for a difference to be statistically significant between years, there must be a shift of at least 2.6% (1.3% around each study year).” Work and school bike commuting are down by 2.6% and 4.5%, respectively. With the HOP Survey Report showing that 59.1% “use the HOP instead of using their bike or walking”, we can expect the coming 1996 Modal Shift survey to show cycling decreasing even faster, as the 1994 survey was done a month before the HOP began.

Why is cycling declining in a city formerly famous for it? The increasing danger. 3 years ago traffic engineer John Allen of Bolder Bicycle Commuters compared FBI to local reports of cyclist injuries and deaths. We had a rate 19 times higher than the national average for cities our size. Of course, Boulder bikes 6 times the average, but this still makes each cyclist more than 3 times as likely to be injured or killed here than the average! Considering this, the City’s expensive Bike Week promotion of cycling amounts to reckless endangerment (Remember to tell your lawyer that if you’re in an accident!) -as well as a failure.

Transportation Division: why won’t you check our figures, as promised last year?

Downtown businesspeople: this decline in cycling citywide is the big reason the 13th Street Bike Path is not the success we expected.

How much does “free” parking really cost?

Parking lots are designed with 2-300 square feet of space for each car, including access and backing space. This is much more than your typical office space! If you drive to work you use more than twice the expensive real estate as someone who doesn’t. Council member Pomerance told me that building a parking structure costs roughly the same per square foot as an office building. Yet, a downtown office space rents for about $20/day while your bigger parking space costs $0-4/day! The difference is hidden in sales and property taxes (which are passed on to renters too). With 7,115 total downtown parking spaces, using the average parking cost of $2/day (per diem for the $175 quarterly parking structure permit) the hidden subsidy just downtown is about $128,000 a day! (7115X$18)

Free parking to businesspeople is like a free lunch to a bureaucrat: both put it on our tab. But business folk should realize that by devoting a quarter of downtown to subsidizing empty cars, the remaining land costs skyrocket. In each 2-300 sq. ft. parking spot 50 customers can park their bikes. (in Amsterdam, a much bigger City with far worse weather, where 40% of travel is by bike, high-rise bike parks fit over 150 bikes in one car space)

How to fix it fairly:

Downtown businesspeople properly say that increased parking costs would drive business to Crossroads, etc. But Boulder citizens helped fund Crossroads, and Transportation Director Weisbach told me the City could charge for parking there. I propose creating parking price zones based on real estate costs. I suggest starting by doubling our downtown parking rate to match Aspen’s modestly successful $1.00/hr, with the surrounding zone costing $.50/hr. and the city periphery $.25/hr. for the first year, to give people time to start changing their habits, and for the provision of better bus and bicycle systems. I also suggest that we treat people like adults and tell them that this is stage one, with rates re-doubled after a year. The City’s TMP treats us like kids by avoiding this main issue, “tweaking” things weakly.

Adults know there’s no such thing as a free lunch -or parking. Somebody’s paying! Now it is all of us, not just in the hidden subsidies, but in our health, safety, and the physical and social distance our paved world imposes. Let’s grow up and stop subsidizing Boulder’s worst problem! To help turn the Timid Misleading Plan into a Truly Meaningful Plan, please contact me at 440-6838 or evan (at) vote.org.

Letter published in 3/28/96 Boulder Weekly (it took 6 weeks to get them to publish it.)

How hypocritical for Colorado Daily reporter Lisa Marshall to lament “Student activism at all-time low” on the 1/23 front page, and for editor Clint Talbott to write on 1/26 that Lisa is working to include a “broader array of voices on our opinion page.” When yours truly (voted “Best Activist” by Boulder Daily Camera readers) told a CU “diversity” meeting last May 1st that CU should “democratize”, Lisa told Clint that I had “disrupted” the meeting and he fired me as Daily columnist, denying me any hearing. I wrote “As the Millennium Turns” for 4 years.

The co-chair of the meeting, Assistant Professor Esteban Flores, wrote the Daily that he “much appreciated Mr. Ravitz’s comments at the May 1st meeting.” Professor Marty Walter, who jumped to his feet at the meeting (all 6’5″ of him) and began by saying “Yes, we need more democracy!”, later said “If anyone disrupted the meeting it was me.” Published letters ran 18-2 for rehiring me, the two negatives being from an employee each of the City and the University, institutional targets of my column.

Small-minded control freaks like Lisa and Clint, in media and politics, are the main reason people shrink from “activism”. The hopeful bumper sticker “If the people lead, the leaders will follow” rarely pans out. Usually, if the people lead, the leaders attack them.

Clint breaks his word to Daily readers. He wrote: “I have not `censored’ Evan Ravitz…and hope he uses the open forum [letters] to express his views”. Yet Clint (or subordinates) held back for months three of the four letters I’ve since written, and removed the key sentence -where I invite people to take “action”- from the fourth! I had to call the Daily publisher to get each one published at all. The same kinds of things happen to many other letter-writers. When Clint learned from Mr. Flores and others that I didn’t disrupt anything, he said he’d talk with me and reconsider, but after putting me off all summer, he reneged. “This conversation is terminated” Clint told me on the phone.

After failing to talk to Terminator, I finally called Lisa (who I’d never spoken to) and asked why she started this. She said she thought I “wasn’t very objective” at the meeting. Lisa doesn’t understand that her job as reporter is to be objective, but mine as columnist was to express opinions. I was at the meeting to participate, and not to write about it, anyway. Even reporters are free to “be active” at meetings they’re not reporting on.

I’ve never met Lisa. But I know Clint too well already. He told me himself that he’s a “misanthrope”, which my Webster’s defines as “A person who hates or distrusts all mankind.” Clint lords it over the community he’s cut himself off from: he rarely returns calls at work, and has an unlisted number at home, unlike those of us who care for and respond to our readers. I regularly give out my number: 440-6838.

Law ‘n order man Clint called Matt Franzen a “moronic vandal” when Matt in ’92 removed the County-erected “safety” gate which prevented cyclists headed to 4-Mile Canyon from using the Creek Path to avoid the Canyon Highway. The County’s gate forced cyclists like Cheryl Amet onto the highway, where she was killed by a dozing driver. This, not vandalism, prompted the local legend “Torchmaster busts County-gate”. Clint now proves a more real danger to law by tacitly advocating vigilante action in an October ’95 editorial, which attorney Patricia Mayne wrote to admonish him for.

Other letters have pointed out his paper’s prejudice against “transients” and “rainbows”. Here’s Clint’s September Freudian slip: “Sam Archibald taught journalism law and ethics (ha, ha) to 75 people at once.” You do have funny ethics, Mr. Talbott.

The Daily, supposedly run by its employees, should consider a new editor. In any case, they should make the editor accountable for his or her words and actions. Democratize, even.

Evan Ravitz

University Hill