This letter is in response to the article entitled “Open Space, CU’s role in preserving Boulder’s greenbelt,” which was in the December 2009 Coloradan. (original article on Coloradan online)

From Michael Charles “Chuck” Hursch (CompSci’88) Larkspur, Calif.

Regarding the open space article in the December 2009 Coloradan, I was an undergraduate physics student of professor Al Bartlett in 1982-83. I see he still wears his trademark bolo tie. I don’t recall being aware of his involvement with open space, but on a related issue, exponential population growth, his remarks on the topic carry with me to this day. It is something I think of frequently, and the images of professor Bartlett down at the lectern discussing this powerful fascinating topic are in my thoughts.

The doubling time of a population undergoing exponential growth can be approximated by the simple formula of 70 divided by the growth rate. The Coloradan article says that Boulder’s growth rate in 1956 was 6 percent yearly, implying a doubling time of roughly 11 to 12 years. Such a powerful small number would take the Boulder population from 32,000 in 1957 to 64,000 in 1968 and 128,000 around 1980, assuming the growth rate remained constant. I believe the Boulder population was actually around 80,000 around 1980, so the growth obviously slowed.

As a teenager growing up in Denver in the early 1970s, I remember riding in my mother’s car in the vicinity of the interchange of I-25 and Hwy. 6 and telling her that I had decided that there were really getting to be a lot more cars on the road. Colorado’s population at that time was roughly two million, mostly along the Front Range corridor. A few years ago I read on the internet that Colorado’s projected population for 2020 was about six million, presumably with most from Fort Collins to Pueblo. I nearly fell out of my chair! If this were to mean something like 8 million by 2030 (a not unlikely prospect), it would mean two doublings had occurred in the 60 years from 1970-2030, or one doubling in 30 years, implying a growth rate of a bit more than 2% per year. Such a small number…

In 1989, I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to take a software job. I found myself in a major metropolitan area with about, you guessed it, six million people, depending on how one defines the Bay Area. I was overwhelmed with the number of people. San Jose (900,000 to 1 million), San Francisco (800,000), Oakland (300,000-400,000) and innumerable smaller cities of 25,000-100,000, one after the other, carpet the landscape. Eight to 10-lane wide freeways running between endless sound walls, dense suburban subdivisions and office parks and shopping centers and car-sale lots on the other side of those walls, mile after mile, tens of miles to the next California-style triple-decker freeway interchange. When I was first out here, traveling one of those freeways, especially at night, down in South Bay (Silicon Valley) or over in East Bay, refrains of “all alone in the … Big City” would ring in my head as I felt like I was in a tube with a mass of other cars moving down the road.

The Bay Area is roughly the size of the Colorado Front Range corridor, maybe within a factor of two, depending on how you slice it. The typography is quite different, however, from the flat high plains and piedmont of the Front Range. For one, there is the large bay and estuary in the middle. Flat areas rim the Bay and valleys extend away from it – these are where most of the population lives.

Mountainous typography upwards of 4,000 feet is outside of that. It is a very hilly area. It is amazing what gets built out here. But once one gets beyond the maze of freeways and shopping malls, and lets their eyes rest upon the vast acres of open space in the oak-studded hills, with the fog rolling in like a river from the coast over the hills and through the Golden Gate, the Bay Area and Babylon by the Bay, the world takes on a beauty all its own. Part of what makes this area what it is and livable are these visions.

For the last 18 years I have been fortunate to live near open space lands. From my apartment door, all I have to do is cross one parking lot and then I can hike in open space with no cars, their noise and fumes, for seven miles over mountain ridges and valleys to the Pacific coast, or take a different turn to explore thousands of acres of chaparral-covered hillsides or redwood-filled valleys. For several years, part of my commute to work consisted of walking through the edge of this open space. This is one of the main reasons I have lived here this long.

Since I moved out here to the Bay Area, I have been between Denver and Boulder, along the turnpike, only two or three times, notably 1999 and 2008. What were once open fields back in the ’60s and ’70s are now extensive housing developments and office parks, particularly near Broomfield and to the south and east, as I remember it. It really made me sit up and take notice. The character of the area is changing. The Denver area is turning into a big city, on track to those epitomes of sprawl, Houston and Los Angeles.

Exponential population growth, open space, quality of life…

Thanks, Professor Bartlett. Memories of many of your lectures remain with me some 30 years later, and will be with me the rest of my life.

Michael Charles “Chuck” Hursch (CompSci’88)

Larkspur, Calif.