Traffic jams indeed.

• Author: Rundles, Jeff
• Position: RUNDLES wrap up

ON MY WAY TO DENVER INTERNATIONAL Airport recently for a passenger pickup, I used my preferred airport route and travelled the entire distance of I-225 from I-25 to I-70. I did that same thing the night I-225 opened way back in 1976 just to get a feel for the new "loop" on the east side of town. What has continued to amaze me over the years--and I have travelled the I-225 route hundreds of times--is that never, not once, not ever did I traverse that 11.959 miles of highway when there wasn't some sort of construction going on. I-225 has always been and IS today, as they say, a work in progress.

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I think of it as a metaphor for Colorado transportation. Once you create more access, a more direct route, you also create more access opportunity for growth, which accelerates the need for more transportation capacity, which leads to more growth and ... you get the picture. We seem to be constantly building to meet the current demand and by the time that project is complete if it ever is there is immediate need to meet higher demands, and so on.

It got me thinking about the relatively new proposal to "improve" the I-70 corridor from Denver to the Vail Valley, the so-called Parsons Plan, developed by the California-based international construction and engineering firm Parsons Corp., which maintains offices in Colorado. In a nutshell, the Parsons Plan calls for adding reversible express toll-way lanes on the roadway between C-470 on the west side of the Denver metro area to Silverthorne, just west of the Eisenhower-Johnson Memorial Tunnel. The $3.5 billion plan also calls for additional bores in the Eisenhower Tunnel and the Twin Tunnels at Idaho Springs.

An interesting note in the reporting concerning this latest attempt to do something--anything!--about the mess that is I-70 in the heavy tourist seasons was a mention of growth. When the first bore at Eisenhower was completed in 1973, the population of Colorado was 1.8 million people. The congestion that had been over Loveland Pass before the tunnel eased for a short time, but even with a second bore (the Johnson Tunnel) opened in 1979, complaints over crowded conditions, particularly during weekends, soon set in. The population in Colorado now stands at nearly 5.2 million people.

The toll-way idea adds a revenue-generating component, which is a necessary idea, but I see little in the plans that addresses whether or not it will be adequate for a sufficient period of time. In...