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Jul 23, 2007 11:19 am US/Mountain
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I-70 Fuels Mountain Economy In Colorado
The Future Of I-70 Travelers
Written for the Web by Andrea Lopez
by Andrea Lopez
FRISCO, Colo. (CBS4) ―
If only someone could wave a magic wand to reveal a picture of what Interstate 70 would look like in 2025. If the decision makers could see a clear and concise picture, it would give them an accurate idea of what needs to be done to the popular mountain corridor during upcoming construction phases to alleviate congestion and make travel easier for those who love to recreate in the high country.
The Colorado Department of Transportation has extensive data in its Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement of what the traffic numbers are projected to be for certain sections of I-70 and during specific times of the week. CDOT is certain there is going to be people traveling during other days of the week to avoid the peak congestion periods that have been seen in the past, such as Fridays headed westbound and Sundays headed eastbound during the winter season. In fact, CDOT along with businesses along the mountain corridor say they're already seeing that happen.
"The highway has pretty much reached its capacity on the weekend times. You can't jam any more traffic onto the corridor at four o'clock on a Sunday afternoon," said Jeff Kullman, Region One Transportation Director for CDOT. "So what will happen is people will move travel times to other times and just spread the congestion out to Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays."
The current traffic studies also predict that traffic numbers are only going to increase as time goes on.
"The phenomenon that we'll see is that those busy times we now see on Saturdays, Sundays, and even Fridays will be occurring every day of the week," said Kullman.
"What we see now--average daily traffic at the Eisenhower Tunnel is approaching 30,000 vehicles a day. That would jump up to well above 40,000 in the year 2025 and the issue is, it will be 40,000 every day as opposed to the 30,000 that we see 2 days a week today."
But Clear Creek County Commissioner Harry Dale, who has been heavily involved with the discussions and meetings involving I-70, has done his own research and it paints a very different picture of what future travel might look like.
"I think that typical travel demand projections for 2025 basically look at where we were in the past 10 or 15 years in terms of population growth and vehicle miles traveled growth, and basically plot a straight line," said Dale. "So if we we're here in 1995, we're here in 2000, and in 2020 we're up here based on past experience. That's not an invalid assumption."
However, Dale said both CDOT's study on future travel numbers, as well as the Denver Chamber of Commerce's study that reports the state will conservatively lose $839 million a year if nothing is done at all to I-70, don't take into consideration some important factors that will likely shape the behavior of travelers in the future.
"One of the first things is our demographics," said Dale. "By 2030, a quarter of the Denver metro residents are going to be seniors. So our senior population is growing very rapidly. That's going to have a substantial change, because of people retiring, on our transportation behavior. They'll be retiring places and not commuting anymore. If they're retired to places in the corridor they're going to live in those places and they're not going to be driving back and forth to Denver."
Dale said a second factor that hasn't been taken into consideration is global climate change.
"We, or most people, recognize that the climate change is significant today," he said. "There are certainly going to be implications from climate change, and whether that's in terms of regulating greenhouse gas emissions or whether it's in terms of different technologies for vehicles that lower greenhouse gas emissions, it's going to create more expense to drive."
There's also concern that the Highway Trust Fund is running out of money. The fund was created by the Highway Revenue Act of 1956 to ensure that the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways and the remainder of the Federal-aid Highway Program would have a reliable source of funding. The money comes from excise taxes on highway motor fuel and truck-related taxes on tire sales, sales of trucks and trailers, and heavy vehicle use. But some people involved in this process of studying the mountain corridor believe we won't be able to rely on federal funding for some of the expensive ideas being discussed for it.
"The costs, that I understand, range anywhere from $2 billion to $6 billion depending on if you put transit into that or some rail component into that," said Joe Blake, President of the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce, and a member of the Blue Ribbon Panel.
The Blue Ribbon Panel was assembled by the Gov. Bill Ritter to study ways to fund future project on I-70.
"The question is, where are you going to come up with that kind of money to make that happen," said Blake.
Dale said future funding for massive projects to improve travel along the corridor may be up to the people who drive.
"We know that there's going to be either a vehicles miles traveled fee, travel tax, some kind of fuel tax, or sales tax because right now the Highway Users Trust Fund doesn't have a future based on a few cents per gallon which hasn't changed in a very long time, not since the mid 90s," said Dale.
Another future phenomenon he said is being ignored is peak oil.
"Peak oil is a phenomenon where we get to the maximum production rate that the world will ever see, the supply of oil," he said. "Some experts say it's happened already, others say it'll happen sometime between 2010 and 2014. And what that means is, not that oil is going to go away, it just will become very expensive. So I see these things leading toward driving becoming more expensive.
"You have a combination of things. Not one of them is significant by itself to say we're not going to be driving the way we are today in 2025, but when you take a look at the big picture and all of these things, you really start to wonder if we are going to be traveling the same way we are today."
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