Denver motorists, be forewarned: Your days are numbered. At least, if City Hall has its way.

Granted, passenger cars, trucks and SUVs aren’t about to disappear from the city anytime soon. Probably not ever from major thoroughfares and outer-ring neighborhoods. But make no mistake — the self-styled urban visionaries in Denver’s municipal government don’t think much of your kind when you sit behind the wheel of your personal motor vehicle.

That’s evident in the convoluted and awkward bike lanes that have overtaken roads around the city’s inner core. They have put a serious squeeze on motorists during rush hour — even as the adjacent surface space reserved for bicycles seems to go unused much of each day. It’s apparent, as well, in the city’s near-elimination of requirements for off-street parking around some multi-family housing developments. Want to live in one? No car for you!

Stay up to speed: Sign up for daily opinion in your inbox Monday-Friday

It’s all part of a broader dream of our mayor and City Council to get Denverites out of their cars and onto mass transit or scooters or bicycles or even on foot — when they go to work, to school, to shop, or go out on the town. The dream gets even bigger when you add the city’s highest hopes for herding ever more people into ever smaller spaces they call home — clustered around transit stops. Jobs, groceries and the like would be only a bus ride away.

It’s unrealistic, even utopian — OK, it’s sheer fantasy — and not only because metro Denver’s light-rail trains have been slowed to a snail’s pace due to deficient rails. Or, because RTD can’t seem to hire enough drivers for its trains or its buses. Or because Denver has — count ‘em — four seasons.

There’s a more fundamental reason the city’s crackdown on cars is on a collision course with reality: Private passenger cars are simply how most Denverites choose to get around. It’s how they roll.

Try telling that to the Denver City Council members who announced this week they want to limit how many gas stations serve the city’s motorists.

Council members Diana Romero Campbell, Amanda Sawyer, and Paul Kashmann said in a press statement Tuesday their proposal, “would prioritize the thoughtful placement of future gas stations as recommended by Denver’s adopted plans, take a holistic approach to address the housing affordability crisis, promote walkable and sustainable development, support the build-out of mixed-use opportunities near transit corridors, and foster place-making.”

In other words, they want to make it harder to fill up your tank. More expensive, too, considering they would be limiting competition.

The ultimate goal is that you park your car and find another way to get where you have to go. Never mind that a bus-and-light-rail trip these days could take an hour or more just to cross the city.

Meanwhile, Kashmann took the opportunity to flunk Economics 101.

“Throughout my nine years on council, I have not received a single call from a resident concerned with the lack of gas stations in their community,” he said in the press release. “What I have received are numerous calls asking why yet another gas station is being built on a corridor where several others already exist.”

Perhaps, no one called to complain about there being too few gas stations because — surprise — the market works. It answers the demand of the silent, overwhelming majority.

But the laws of economics aren’t enough to stop the war on cars, at least, for Kashmann and his cohorts. Dare we hope a majority of their peers on the council feels otherwise?

Denver Gazette Editorial Board