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It's hard to know what to make of Amendment 26 on our statewide ballot. It calls for taking $50 million that would otherwise go to state tax refunds, and spending that money to study and develop the technology for a high-speed monorail.
If the study shows promise, then we would be asked to help fund a $4 billion system that extends about 150 miles along the Interstate 70 corridor between Denver International Airport and Eagle County Airport west of Vail.
Such a monorail, according to its promoters, would carry thousands of passengers daily at high speeds, thereby eliminating the need to add lanes to Interstate 70.
Expanding the highway would be an expensive project, just in the physical sense, and it might be even more expensive in the political sense -- there would be serious opposition from Clear Creek County, and an entire generation of consultants should be able to retire from what they'll earn from writing scoping statements, environmental impact statements, wildlife impact statements and the like.
But that's the choice, according to Miller Hudson, one
of the monorail's main advocates. He argues that if we
take the do nothing
approach, then the political
pressure will build toward highway expansion, which he
rightly sees as an economic and environmental disaster.
Some candidate will get elected governor on the promise of
expanding I-70, just as Bill Owens got elected in 1998 with
promises to speed improvements on I-25 south of Denver.
This scenario doesn't seem inevitable to me, though. We live in a market economy where people can make choices. If driving on I-70 becomes intolerable, won't more people fly? Wouldn't more people take buses? Wouldn't many people just stay at or near home, or find another route or another destination for their mountain recreation?
Why is it our duty to provide world-class transportation to the resorts and subdivisions of Summit and Eagle counties? If protecting investments and elevating real-estate prices is important, they why aren't Steamboat Springs and Crested Butte and Telluride just as deserving? Why not build a high-speed monorail from Punkin Center to Denver, so that the real-estate developers of Lincoln County can make some serious money?
Colorado has been through something like this before. The problem is that Denver sits in the wrong place. The Continental Divide due west of Denver is higher and steeper than at any other stretch in its 3,000 miles.
Early transcontinental routes, like the Oregon Trail, solved this problem by going through Wyoming. The Union Pacific Railroad applied the same solution in 1867. The Denver & Rio Grande Railroad found routes west from Pueblo.
But Denver wanted its direct route west. A century ago, pioneer banker David Moffat was spending his fortune trying to provide that route -- a railroad. When he died in 1911, he had reached Steamboat Springs, and getting there meant riding a train over 11,660-foot Rollins Pass, which was often closed during the nine months of winter at that elevation.
A tunnel was the obvious solution. But no private investor would touch it, which meant contriving some form of public financing -- assuming the public could be persuaded that the tunnel was in the public interest.
It certainly wasn't in Pueblo's interest, since all the east-west traffic through Colorado passed through Pueblo then.
That opposition from southern Colorado was enough to kill a 1911 bill in the legislature which would have allowed the state to issue bonds to drive a tunnel under Rollins Pass. So a 1920 initiative attempted to spread the pork around with three tunnels: Rollins Pass, of course, along with tunnels at Monarch and Cumbres passes for the narrow-gauge lines to Gunnison and Durango.
It failed at the polls. What finally worked was the creation of the Moffat Tunnel Improvement District, which could issue bonds backed by taxes collected only in the counties along the line from Denver to Craig.
The idea behind this public enterprise was to give Colorado some control over its transportation destiny. It didn't work out that way, of course -- the Moffat Tunnel today is part of the very same Union Pacific Railroad that it was supposed to compete with.
Something like that happened with Denver International Airport. The idea was to have several airlines competing with DIA as a hub; the result was an expensive facility dominated by United Air Lines.
One reason advanced for $50 million in monorail research is to make Colorado a center for this technology. And if our history is any guide, then even if this happens, some corporation based somewhere else will get the benefit.
We can design and build grand and impressive things in Colorado, but we haven't quite figured out how to operate them to our benefit.
Even so, I'll probably vote for it. After all, if they don't do something about I-70, then there could be improvements to U.S. 285, which would mean more people in the mountains around here. If Amendment 26 will keep them in the Sacrifice Zone, then I'm all for it.
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