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

With this giant bottleneck in mind, some are calling for more serious study of alternative routes. The Colorado Department of Transportation, in its $14 million PEIS, has examined everything from new tunnels along the northern Front Range to a widened Highway 285 through Bailey and then under Georgia Pass, into Breckenridge. CDOT's analysis has found wanting most bold, new solutions to the gridlock, given prospects for limited funding. Others, finding the CDOT analysis wanting, call for better use of the railroad corridor to Winter Park. The state's funding criterion--capped at $4 billion--has also screened out monorails and other futuristic mass-transit systems.

But questions have also been raised about the environmental impacts of highways.

Sand spread on I-70 across Vail Pass has trickled down into Black Core Creek, creating a scene that looks vaguely industrial in a mountain setting. Colorado's alternative solution to easy, fast car-based winter travel is magnesium chloride. If no evidence has yet emerged that clearly shows the chemical is harmful to human health, the fact that it has caused power to go off in communities along I-70, that it destroys wiring in trucks, and seems to cause road-side trees to die is all unsettling. Noise is another jarring consequence of I-70 and other highways. Vail, once concerned mostly by the aesthetics of I-70, now is exploring European models for tunneling highways. Deteriorated air quality is yet another consequence. While the PEIS finds no clear flags that expansion of I-70 will violate federal air quality standards, recent Sierra Club studies in Los Angeles have found that people living near highways, particularly children, face greater dangers of having impaired lungs. The full cost of cheap, easy automobile travel is not necessarily paid in full at the pump.

Mass transit advocates, for their part, have one fundamental problem. For all their divergent enthusiasms, they have not effectively been able to point to one, single example of a mass-transit system (other than buses) that works in a topography and climate similar to that of I-70. Not unless lots of tunnels are involved. And even the precedent for that, railroads in the Alps, are being abandoned by European consumers crazy about their cars--even at $5-per-gallon of gasoline to fuel them. And Cracraft, the former RTD director from Boulder, is probably correct when he says Colorado is in no mood to experiment. "The DIA baggage-handling system ought to have taught us something about being on the cutting edge of technology," says Cracraft, who nonetheless was indeed on the winning side of the Fast-Tracks proposal. Cracraft further points to anxiety over funding, noting that Colorado had a knock-down fight over Referendum C, which wasn't even a tax increase. "There isn't enough (money) to do all of these things."

Calls for a monorail up the highway, a symbol for the general idea of a mass-transit solution to the gridlock, have been long on enthusiasm, but short on realistic assessments of the population densities mass transit needs to operate and is also likely to generate.