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Sep 8, 2007 7:36 pm US/Mountain
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Mountain I-70 Widening Isn't Getting Much Support
by Andrea Lopez
FRISCO, Colo. (CBS4) ―
If you ask anyone who drives Interstate 70 about their thoughts on the congestion that can occur during peak travel times, most will tell you that something has to be done to relieve it. The question is: what is the magic solution that will make thing better for travelers and local residents who have to contend with the congestion as well?
"Well I think the congestion on Interstate 70 is getting progressively worse," said Colorado Department of Transportation Region 1 transportation director Jeff Kullman, "And what we're now seeing happen is it's going into other days -- it's not just a Saturday/Sunday issue. We're beginning to see Fridays and Thursdays and Mondays become congested as well. I've heard reports that on some of the worst days it can take three or four hours to have a return trip from the Summit County area to the Denver Metro area, which is normally and hour and 15 minute drive."
When it comes to interstate widening, The Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) has been looking at a few different variations on the idea but it mainly involves widening all of Clear Creek County and possibly the Dowd Canyon area just west of Vail. Currently, Clear Creek County is four lanes. The idea is to widen it to six lanes. CDOT said congestion is the worst in that county, and that's where the bulk of the widening would take place if that option is chosen to relieve congestion.
"With highway widening a lot of the need is from Floyd Hill to the Eisenhower tunnel," said CDOT Program Engineer Brian Pinkerton. "Also in an area west of Vail and Dowd Canyon. Currently through most of Clear Creek County it is two lanes in each direction plus lanes to get on and off the highway. The highway alternative that we would be looking at the hardest is three lanes in each direction."
In CDOT's Draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement or PEIS, it reads: " ...the highway alternatives would cover Dowd Canyon in Eagle County and the entire reach of Clear Creek County. The 65 mph alternative would build additional tunnels in Dowd Canyon and in isolated locations in Clear Creek County. The 55 mph alternative third tunnel bores would be limited to the Continental Divide and Twin Tunnel."
"This stretch of I-70 that we're at right now [Twin Tunnels] has a series of tight curves and it's kind of a high accident location for I-70," said Pinkerton. "And so there has been a lot of desire, even by the corridor communities, to improve the highway to where it's a 65 mile per hour design speed. Right now in these tight curves it's about a 45 mile per hour design speed. And so people are cruising down the mountains at a fairly high rate of speed -- there are a lot of straight-aways -- and then they hit these tight curves in Clear Creek and there are a lot of accidents."
"One of the things that will be contemplated is tunneling through Dowd Junction," said Vail Town Manager Stan Zemler. "One, for safety reasons -- it is one of the most hazardous places along the I-70 corridor; also you have some slide issues where the mountain is actually coming down and if it came down it would be very significant impact on blocking I-70. So one of the considerations in the environmental impact statement is to actually bore through and put in a tunnel, and drop you on the west side of the Minturn area thus avoiding the high hazard area as well as the high crash zone in there."
Zemler said, from a town's perspective, the concerns about widening include an increase in noise. The town has been very proactive in trying to enforce the 65 mile per hour speed limit by putting some of its own officers up on I-70. Noise has already been a massive problem for residents living there.
"We are obviously already burdened with the noise issue on I-70," said Zemler. "We've done quite a bit of research and analysis monitoring and measuring noise coming off of I-70 and about 25 percent of the physical property next to I-70, and you'd be surprised. A fair distance off of I-70 is already impacted, meaning the federal standard is already violated. So, if anything is done to widen the corridor through Vail ...if there is widening of any kind through Vail, there would have to be an environmental assessment or environmental impact statement. At that point it's very likely that the federal highways would have to come into compliance with the federal noise standard which would mean walls, burms -- whatever it took to deal with the noise mitigation."
If you ask most people in Clear Creek County, they'll tell you that widening isn't getting much support. That's because merely a concrete barrier and chain link fence separate parts of it from I-70, like around the city of Idaho Springs. In some cases I-70 is right up against the faces of rocky cliffs and Clear Creek. There isn't much room for expansion and there's fear that much will be lost if another lane is added in each direction.
"It's in our backyard," said Idaho Springs Mayor Dennis Lundberry. "Engine 60, which is the train behind city hall, sits partly on their [CDOT] right of way; this parking lot which is a major city parking lot is right next to the right of way, and as you mentioned the football field on the west end of town would be impacted -- and we don't know how many homes. We have been very vocal but it's because we're so impacted. We suffer the most from whatever they do on that highway -- from the impacts from construction to everything."
Idaho Springs is nearly 150 years old. There's concern that widening would cut into parts of the communities along I-70, and possibly historic sites.
"Well I guess what I'd like the general public who's trying to understand this project to have a better grip on is that Clear Creek County and its towns have been in existence since the 1860's -- since before we were a state," said former County Commissioner and Clear Creek Resident Jo Ann Sorensen. "These communities are important economically to the state of Colorado. They're important socially and they're important historically. And we'd hate to think that people will make a decision very irrationally or very superficially based on what they think is expedient to move traffic right now. I think they should take into consideration the importance of these communities, the importance of these communities as a symbol of Colorado, as well as an important feature of Colorado that people travel from all over the world to see and appreciate."
Sorensen said the county was a mineral belt, prominent in the 1860's when gold was found. She said many of the communities along the mountain corridor lost 20 percent, 30 percent, and even 40 percent of their land when the interstate was first built and that they don't want to see that happen again.
"We think we have engineering expertise in this country, in this state, on this planet that could come up with solutions that will respect the environment here and that will respect the communities here," said Sorensen.
"It's a sensitive issue," said Pinkerton. "Putting the highway through Idaho Springs was tough the first time they did it and widening it would be tough again. We've looked at alternatives where the highway may be stacked and that would perhaps even free up some land that we currently occupy to give back to the town. I mean it would be our goal to take no more footprint than is absolutely necessary in that town because we respect that historic town."
But the concerns of the Clear Creek County residents span farther than just concerns about what they might lose. There are concerns that disturbing old mining sites would stir up some of the dangerous materials once used to process ore, causing an environmental hazard.
"Underneath the surface of the highway, at this point, there are 23 mills sites that have been identified in Clear Creek County that were along the creek. Now they are under the highway," said Sorensen.
"So when you start ripping up the highway you may mobilize some of those metals like mercury, arsenic, cadmium -- so there's some pretty bad stuff that could get put into that water supply," said County Commissioner Harry Dale.
"Any time that we embark on a construction we'll do an evaluation for what types of potential pollutants are in the area and certainly in an area like this where there are so many old mining sites," said Pinkerton. "We'd do an evaluation and anything that we'd run into we'd be very careful to handle appropriately so that those minerals didn't end up in the watershed."
The environmental concerns don't just end with dangerous mining materials that may be stirred up. There are also feelings that more cars will mean more pollution, and more lanes to maintain will mean more sand and chemicals that have the potential to affect Clear Creek.
"Today, on average, in all of clear creek county -- the 30 miles or so that pass through Clear Creek County -- 670 tons of traction sand is used per mile per winter and a good majority of that winds up in the creek," said Dale. "In terms of magnesium chloride, liquid deicers -- 13,800 gallons per mile used annually. Now, when you go to a six lane highway, the traction sand goes up to 1100 tons per mile and the chemical deicer goes up to 20,000 gallons per mile. A vast majority of all of that winds up in the creek.
"The biggest problem for increase vehicle travel is not in the emission, it's in the particulate matter that the vehicles kick up. Dust, dirt, even minerals from the mineralized area is all kicked up by a wheel rotating. That's a concern no matter what the technology is -- the more vehicles the more entrained dust, the more air quality degradation."
But perhaps the biggest concern that locals along the corridor have is the estimated 15 year construction time frame that it would take to build six lanes through the county. CDOT said that time frame would depend on how many phases the project would take, and how much money would be available and when. But that's the estimate.
"You will not find a quick and easy bypass if you intend to travel the I-70 corridor during those ten to 15 years of construction," said Sorensen. "There are going to be huge economic impacts, not only to the locals who in their daily lives need to travel this corridor but to the people who are trying to get through this area to get to their choice of resorts or get to their business interests on the western slope."
"CDOT has told us that they are going to avoid the weekends," said Dale. "But you've got to do construction sometime. One of the biggest impacts for us is that we're going to have gridlock Monday through Friday in the county when they're doing construction, and so we can't get our kids to school, we can't get to the grocery store, we can't get our teachers to school -- we have that problem ...so everybody who lives in this county is going to be mobility restricted during the entire construction period. You've either got weekend peak period traffic, or construction during the week."
CDOT is currently preparing for a new series of public meetings that will last six to nine months long. They'll be held at the Keystone Center, giving people an opportunity to be a part of the future solution and to suggest other options for improving I-70 that they feel CDOT has not explored. CDOT's hope is to reach a consensus about what should be done with the mountain corridor. The meetings will start in October.
"We think that they [CDOT] have not given, up until now, adequate consideration to the stakeholders concerns," said Lundberry. "They had what were called mountain advisory corridor involvement meetings but they really weren't listening and it became sort of an opportunity for CDOT to tell us what they were doing and they never really considered any of the input that we had -- concerns about the environmental impacts, what are you doing to account for the environmental impacts, what are the cumulative environmental impacts that we're going to have. Now, with the new CDOT executive director [Russel George] we're told that they're going to reopen that public input process and deal more with the stakeholders and we're very glad to see that."
Many people along with CDOT have said that each option being explored won't take care of the problem on its own.
"If you make improvements on the corridor, let's just say for example we close our eyes and all of a sudden we have six lanes throughout the corridor, then what you're going to see is that the hours of congestion will remain probably the same," said Kullman. "If we put six lanes on the corridor, a Sunday afternoon is still going to be a pretty busy time. It's not going to disappear but what you'll see is the off-peak times will be a lot smoother, you'll get through on a Monday through Friday a whole lot smoother."
"So if we were to widen it, eventually it would fill up to where it's congested again, no doubt," said Pinkerton. "If we do nothing basically the highway will continue to get more and more clogged. While it's a very expensive program to embark on I-70 I think there's a lot of feeling around the state that it's a very important corridor to generate tourism dollars, for quality of life issues, for people from the front range to get to the mountains, and for people from the mountains to get to the front range. I think pretty much statewide there's an agreement that there's a need to do something with this corridor.
"We're really coming into this collaborative process with an open mind, trying to work with the communities. I think at this point CDOT is very interested in a multi-module solution. And so I would not be surprised at all, at the end of this collaboration process, if we have a highway component and a transit component."
"There is no silver bullet solution, there is no one-and-only-solution," said Lundberry. "There needs to be highway improvements and some things done to improve the congestion characteristics of the corridor, and we think those can be done on an incremental basis. But we think CDOT can do those and then measure the positive impacts before they just say they should widen the highway. It has to be a mix, and it has to be a mix of changing how people use the highway, times they use the highway, improvements on the highway, and there has to be a mass transportation component we believe. There's no easy solution, there's no one single solution. Just widening the highway isn't going to do it, just fixing the pinch points isn't going to do it, mass transit alone isn't going to do it -- we all have to work together on it."
Additional Resources:• See an
overview of the Project I-70 special series of reports on CBS4, with additional links and Andrea Lopez' blog about the assignment.
• To take a look at some of the interstate alternatives being discussed
on a special section of i70mtncorridor.com.
• Article written by Jeffrey Bergeron or Biff America (popular radio and TV personality, author):
A Male Donkey And A Matter Of Opinion
(© MMVII CBS Television Stations, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)