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As ski season gears up, the annual complaints about Interstate 70 will resume. Colorado has this problem with snow. Not only does it fall on the bunny hills and black-diamond runs, where it's supposed to accumulate, but the pernicious stuff also lands on highways.
The biggest of those highways, Interstate 70, is crowded anyway: Colorado's population has grown 19 percent in the past dozen years, but I-70 traffic has increased 58 percent.
In a fair world, we could just wait for things to balance out. At some point, I-70 would be so crowded, or so often blocked, that many people would just quit using it.
But in Colorado, two factors work against this. One is that the resorts along Interstate 70 are owned by big corporations, which want the highway to be open and uncongested. To arrange matters so that they get what they want, we have a liaison body known as the General Assembly, and to attend surrender ceremonies, we have a governor.
The second factor is Denver International Airport. It needs business to pay off its loans, and skiers provide considerable revenue. If I-70's woes made it difficult to get from DIA to Breckenridge or Vail, then the skiers might land elsewhere -- Gunnison or Grand Junction, perhaps, or, perish the thought, Salt Lake City, home of the 2002 Winter Olympics.
So, Denver doesn't have much choice but to promote an expanded I-70, and big business likes the idea, too.
Little wonder, then, that all sorts of notions have been floating around, all with problems.
Add a few lanes? The road would have to pass through Clear Creek County, where there's no room for both a ten-lane highway and towns like Silver Plume and Idaho Springs. For some reason, people there don't want to lose their homes, just so a busload of Denver commuters bound for the Wendy's in Silverthorne will get there in time to start their shift on schedule.
The new lanes might be stacked atop the old ones in a Glenwood Canyon arrangement, but that means serious money, and even in Colorado, there's a limit to how much the public is willing to subsidize ski resorts and outlet malls.
Rail service? Well, there are tracks in place between Denver and Minturn, just a few miles from Vail, but the state wants to install a hiking trail on much of that route.
Direct air service? There's not much room for airports in narrow mountain valleys, and besides, the idea is to get them to land at DIA, not bypass it.
Besides, we should fix the problems that I-70 has already caused before we start adding to the complications by increasing the capacity of the corridor.
My first visit to Breckenridge was on a late summer afternoon in 1970, several years before the tunnel opened. A dog dozed comfortably on Main Street. A burger with a beer at the Gold Pan cost about a dollar. No house had been painted since the Truman administration, and most yards boasted several rusting cars on blocks.
What sane person would not prefer that relaxed Breckenridge to the current hectic version, made possible by I-70?
Granted, there was substantial environmental damage in the old days. From Wheeler Junction (Copper Mountain on modern maps) to Leadville is 23 miles, and along the way you can see the effects of nearly 140 years of breaking rock in one of the most heavily mined areas in the nation.
Start in Golden and drive to Vail, and you see the effects of 25 years of industrial tourism -- not for 23 miles, but for 90 miles. Tourism obviously chews up more landscape, and shreds it faster, than mining. And they want to expand I-70?
A bigger I-70 would also cut a bigger swath. As it is, the sacrifice zone is about 50 miles wide, from the Copper Mountain employee bus idling in Buena Vista to the West Africans placed in Kremmling by a New York labor contractor.
Widen the highway and this corridor of low wages, no benefits and long hours would expand -- that's a shabby way for a state government to treat its own citizens.
Increasing the capacity of Interstate 70 would only aggravate the problems it already causes, and we elect our leaders to solve problems, not make them worse.
Perhaps we could do a reverse Environmental Impact Statement -- examine the effects of I-70 on the environment (not just the physical environment, but the social environment, too), and then take steps to mitigate them.
Resorts, for instance, might be required to pay their employees a wage sufficient for them to live within five minutes of their jobs, thereby reducing traffic congestion.
Big trucks don't pay their own way, so why continue to subsidize them by allowing them on I-70? Outlaw them, or at least raise the ton-mile tax so that they'll tear up the roads in Wyoming or New Mexico.
And when conditions are terrible -- glare ice under a blinding blizzard, say -- then allow only four-wheel-drive sport utility vehicles on the highway, thereby improving the odds that their drivers won't be around to buy more overpriced mountain real estate.
Only after fixing the current problems, should we consider any I-70 improvements.
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