Cloggedartery: the drive up I-70 grows more agonizing for front range skiers every year, but the obstacles of money and mountains aren't budging

ColoradoBiz, March, 2006 by Allen Best

WHAT TO DO?

I-70 has become like the old saying attributed (probably falsely) to Mark Twain: "Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody ever does anything about it." After a decade-long conversation about what to do, only a thin consensus is emerging, that of bundling short-term highway improvements with a longer-term plan for some yet unspecified form of mass transit. Perhaps even more important than absence of a cohesive vision is the lack of money. Even the easy things that Clear Creek County is now agreeing to--a climbing lane at Georgetown, straightening and triple laning of portions of the interstate, among other things--lack clear funding sources.

State officials predict a confident budget of no more than $1.6 billion for I-70 west from Denver during the next 20 years. Issuing bonds--as was done to finance the T-REX project in Denver--could boost the up-front budget to $4 billion. But unlike T-REX, which includes light rail as well as widened highways, the valley of Clear Creek is too narrow to easily accommodate additional lanes. The problem is most evident at Idaho Springs. Reaming the community to accommodate a wider I-70 would nick the high school football field, chew up houses, and further encroach on the business district.

The line in the sand drawn by Idaho Springs residents and officials is no expansion of the highway's footprint. That stance fuels talk of another plan: cantilevered decking similar to what was done in Glenwood Canyon--at $80 million a mile, the most expensive segment of interstate highway construction in the country when it was completed in 1992. A similar project in Idaho Springs might well cost $100 million a mile. But who would pay?

A BRIEF HISTORY

Denver from its earliest days has always been attentive to transportation infrastructure. Original Denver town-site boosters placed their city advantageously on the northeast side of Cherry Creek, in order to first greet arriving stage lines--before rivals on the south bank in old town Auraria. For that simple reason the region is now the Denver metro area, not the Auraria metro area. Looking westward, early city fathers plotted a direct route to Salt Lake City, which yielded what is now the Highway 40 corridor, and also a railroad, what some still call the Moffat Road. The riches of Leadville prompted the further extension of roads and railways into the mountains. But as early as 1922, some in Denver were seeing beyond the mining craze.

A former landscape architect for the Forest Service, Arthur Carhart, writing in a magazine called Denver Municipal Facts, outlined a concept that he called the "recreational fan." Carhart, who is best remembered for his early advocacy of wilderness preservation at Trappers Lake in the Flat Tops, asserted that mountain recreation would ultimately be Denver's greatest asset. If Carhart thought in terms of railroads in 1922, proponents of the Good Roads movement were thinking in terms of a new era, the age of the automobile. At the time, the most direct route from Denver to Glenwood Springs by car went through Buena Vista, and even then not in winter. Passes were not plowed in winter until 1930. State highway engineer Charlie Vail supervised New Deal funding of a road across an unnamed pass in 1939. No more than a horse trail, the new travel corridor was given Vail's name by a gratified citizenry in Eagle and Summit counties.