State continues to improve highway, transit systems
By: Mark Samuelson
How do you move 5.3 million people around a state that is split in half by mountain ranges that tower to 14,000 feet? Creatively, is the answer – and those creative solutions are garnering accolades for Colorado this year.
Despite the well-documented challenges faced by the state’s drivers, few appear to be abandoning their beloved cars, especially at a time when gas prices have dropped dramatically. The Colorado Automobile Dealers Association shows overall new-car sales registrations up 6.2 percent last year (through November) over 2013, putting 2014 on track to be the fourth-best year for auto sales since the new millennium.
Indeed, the Rocky Mountains are a major obstacle to transportation, but they also lure new arrivals to the state, adding volume to freeway traffic. On weekends, those new residents join the throngs already well-versed in the crowded weekend drives over the Continental Divide.
Colorado has showcased ways to do that for a century or more – opening the 7-mile-long Moffat Tunnel rail route across the divide near Winter Park in 1927; and the first bore of I-70’s Eisenhower Tunnel in 1973. The cost of both bores for today’s four-lane capacity was $262 million – a number that looks minuscule compared to the $4 to $5 billion the Colorado Department of Transportation estimates a third bore would cost now.
But as the tunnel becomes a routine bottleneck for traffic both winter and summer, that sum looks tiny
compared to the $12 to $20 billion estimated for a high-tech, 100-mile-per-hour “guideway” train from Denver to Eagle County Airport, envisioned in a CDOT feasibility study last year.
Planners doubt we’ll ever have the resources for that project, but they’re getting creative with makeshift solutions. This year, travelers on I-70 will see an added “shoulder lane” that CDOT is creating on 13 miles of the eastbound side of the interstate, an innovation that should knock time off the current drive. That coincides with the re-opening of the now-widened Twin Tunnels east of Idaho Springs, which has helped speed traffic through that region.
Meanwhile, planners are grappling with a much more expensive project to widen I-70 through northeast Denver, a freeway section completed in the early 1960s to standards nowhere the capacity of car and truck traffic today.
The current widening of U.S. 36 to Boulder is creating headaches for drivers now – as the T-REX I-25 widening did a decade ago – but will pay dividends in the future. And new growth around Denver toward Castle Rock and Colorado Springs, and north toward cities of Loveland, Greeley and Fort Collins, is moving up the priority of interstate widening projects.
On the mass-transit side, RTD continues work on a major expansion of the commuter rail system in 2016. As part of those FasTracks openings, riders from Union Station will travel 11.2 miles to Arvada and Wheat Ridge, 22.8 miles to DIA and 6.2 miles to Westminster, on a line that may someday reach Boulder and Longmont. The hope is that all the new stations along the way will spawn neighborhood shopping districts, high-density housing and walkable attractions.
