The irony here:

Massive sprawl based (and un-green) growth has allowed Denver the wealth to afford things like this while massive sprawl based decline in Buffalo has left the area too poor to push forward these types of initiatives.

Ok, not to get too far off the subject here, but, I was in Denver last month, and noticed something very successful. Their 16th Street pedestrian mall. 16th street mall is a pedestrian mall in downtown Denver, similar in every way to our own pedestrian mall in downtown Buffalo. The lone exception is that Denver utilizes gas powered buses as opposed to light rail for public transportation on the mall. In both cities, vehicle traffic is not permitted, and the entire mall is a fare free zone, meaning of course, that all rides are free.

Well…there was one more difference that I noticed between the Denver's ped mall, and our own. People and business! There were people everywhere. I stayed in a hotel on 16th Street, on a Tuesday. I noticed thousands of people on the mall. at 10 am, noon, 2pm, 5pm, and even at 11pm the streets still had hundreds of people of all ages and creed. The free buses were loaded with people at all hours as well. There were businesses lining the 20 blocks from the start of the mall, all the way to the end. Many were restaurants, packed with people. There was an outdoor retail center, loaded with shops, bars and a movie theater, all doing quite well.

The reason that I bring this up, is that, as we all know, our leaders within the City of Buffalo would like to spend tens of millions of dollars to remove our own downtown pedestrian mall. There is an unfounded common belief that the mall killed downtown Main St, and downtown Buffalo as a whole. If this were true, wouldn’t downtown Denver, and its mall be in the same shape as ours? My point is, it wasn't, and still isn't our light rail line, or the pedestrian mall that has killed downtown. Wouldn't we be much better served to utilize the millions of dollars planed to tear out our mall, and invest instead, back into downtown, and Main St? Imagine…seed money for building rehabilitation and conversion? Tax credits to make doing business downtown more affordable? Dollars for more police patrols? $50 million can go a long way into the rebuilding of downtown Buffalo!

It is arguable as to whether our pedestrian mall is an asset, however, where is the evidence that it is a detriment? The ped malls work in Minneapolis as well. In the 1980s, Denver was a cold, industrial city, much like Buffalo. In the past 20 years, they have reinvented themselves. It's time to do the same in Buffalo. We laid the foundation for that in the 70s, with the beginning of light rail and a pedestrian mall. Isn't now the time to finish what we started, as opposed to trashing it, and starting from scratch? We need to let our "leaders" know what we think. Maybe they should take a discovery trip to Denver and Minneapolis, and see how they made their malls work, before wasting not only the millions it will take to tear ours out, but the hundreds of millions that we spent to put it in.

Or, maybe I'm way off base...

Impressive. And what is My Fair City planning to do while all this is going on--? To demolish and fill in our old subway tunnel downtown, which could otherwise easily serve as the nucleus/incubator for a regional light rail transit system. Ugggh.