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Rather than enjoy the cool alpine breezes as they motored along a scenic mountain byway, thousands of Colorado residents and visitors spent a goodly portion of the Independence Day weekend stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic on U.S. 285 and Interstate 70.
Some pundits suggest this will make Coloradans more likely to approve a ballot issue that would allow the state to spend money it doesn't have to build roads that will be overcrowded a few weeks after the ribbon is cut.
That's not the only proposal floating around, though. There's also a suggestion for a high-speed rail line of some sort that would parallel I-70, thereby serving the two major goals of Colorado's unofficial transportation policy:
1) Insuring that out-of-state skiers arrive at Denver International Airport, thus providing income to pay off the construction bonds, and
2) Assisting the public-spirited philanthropists who operate Vail Resorts by easing the travel path of the geese who go there to be plucked.
Never mind that the construction of such a rail line along that corridor was beyond the considerable talents of the locating engineers a century ago, back when they took railroading seriously.
The Georgetown Loop, now resurrected, represented one such failed effort. It came to a dead end at Silver Plume because it was impossible to go west from there.
The only remotely successful pioneer transportation
project thereabouts was Marcus Brick
Pomeroy's Great
Atlantic & Pacific Tunnel. It never connected
Colorado's Eastern and Western slopes, but it did succeed
in bilking dollars from gullible investors.
Clearly, new ideas are in order, and perhaps Gov. Bill Owens and Colorado Department of Transportation will consider some creative approaches.
· Size limits. They could start by banning those road-clogging long-haul semis. Some years ago, a system for transporting heavy stuff overland was perfected -- it's called a railroad. Compulsive truckers would be rerouted to Interstate 80. Since these trucks cause more damage to roads than they pay in highway taxes, why not let Wyoming subsidize them?
Over time, the traffic would again congeal, but the vehicular size limit could be progressively reduced so as to expand highway capacity without expanding the highway. Land-yachts could be forbidden, followed by monster pickups and the larger SUVs.
Eventually I-70 from Denver to Glenwood Springs might be
limited to motorcycles and Geo Metros, but traffic would
move quickly and smoothly on even the busiest holiday
weekends, and it's about time we found out whether our
Republican rulers are serious about economy in
government
or whether it was just more campaign
blather.
· A gondola tramway. Our mining industry used these for years -- buckets suspended from a moving cable held up by towers. The ski industry successfully adapted the concept to haul customers up mountains.
And they work for public transportation, too. When I was in Telluride last fall, well before the first snow, I saw what looked like a gondola lift running around the clock.
I learned that this is the public transportation system between the real Telluride and the new Mountain Village over in the next valley. The lift sits above the snow, so the route doesn't need plowed, and it consumes much less energy than buses would in moving the same traffic.
So why not build a long one from Vail to DIA? Not only would it haul people back and forth efficiently, but it should be a major tourist attraction in itself.
· Gas tax increase. If gasoline cost $10 a
gallon, many urban residents would find something to do
other than go to the mountains
on hot days. Some
might be enticed to symphony concerts or Rockies games, but
many moved to the Front Strange so that they could enjoy
the mountains.
No problem. Some of the tax proceeds could be used to build domed and air-conditioned hypoxic parks in the metro area, where people could enjoy the Colorado mountain experience -- hooking stocked rainbow trout, watching staged gunfights, sitting on an undulant raft -- without the road-clogging aggravation and expense of actually going to the mountains.
Certain critics might question the authenticity
of these experiences, but these virtual mountain
environments should be an improvement on the real thing --
with proper management, there would be no blood-sucking
woodticks, camp-wrecking raccoons, ear-splitting off-road
motorcycles, or upscale wilderness campers complaining that
their pagers and cell phones weren't working properly.
Granted, the fairest thing to do would be to tax the big resorts and real-estate developers -- the ones who would profit from bigger highways -- and have them pay for adding lanes. But since that will never happen in Colorado, we need to come up with something else.
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