Just Say NO to Highway Expansion!

Highway Expansion - Creating Tomorrows Transportation Problems Today

 

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Let's ignore the fact that the I-70 mountain corridor solution will be implemented in the 2020 to 2025 timeframe, not tomorrow.

Let's design our future to accommodate more cars and trucks instead of designing our future to accommodate more people.

Let's focus our transportation efforts on moving cars and trucks instead of moving people.

Let's make cars and trucks more important than people in our land use and transportation planning processes.

Let's prioritize car and truck facilities over over bicycle, public transportation and pedestrian facilities that comprise "Complete Street" programs. 

Let's ignore mountain corridor resort overcrowding and congestion that occurs today during peak periods and invite even more vehicles through I-70 highway expansion.

Let's ignore the residents of mountain communities that do not want any more vehicles in their towns during peak periods.

Let's ignore the overuse of Colorado's public lands and the environmental degradation that comes with it.

Let's design a highway widening solution that envisions automobile travel behavior in the year 2025 to be identicial or greater than today without regard for climate change, peak oil, rising fuels cost, tolling, VMT fees, geopolitical instability in the Middle East, our changing demographics and lack of highway maintenance funds.

Let’s ignore the fact that we cannot afford to even maintain the highway infrastructure that we already have, let alone maintain any new highway infrastructure that we might create.

Let's dump the enormous maintenance debt of taking care of our existing roads and bridges on our children and grandchildren while at the same time prioritizing spending for highway expansion projects that will create even more maintenance debt.

Let's allow the same 1950's/1960's interstate highway era transportation philosophy and those who support this philosophy (CDOT Region 1, highway contractors, highway engineers, oil companies, automobile manufacturers, automobile dependent development interests and all politicians with a vested interest in keeping the status quo of highway expansion as our primary transportation solution) to dominate the transportation planning and funding discussion for the 21st Century.

Let's expect that the same 1950's/1960's interstate highway era transportation philosophy that created the congestion and transportation infrastructure mess that we have today, to provide our transportation solutions for the 21st Century.

Let's ignore the sustainable transportation and land use vision of the Environmental and Smart Growth organizations because they don't support the empowered financial interests vested in continued highway expansion, continued auto-dependent development, continued US reliance on foreign oil and continued US military presence in the Middle East.

Let's ignore the fact that our transportation planning and funding process is not about making the best decisions and selecting the best transportation and land use alternatives, but rewarding a select and very powerful group of special interest groups regardless of the national and international political and environmental consequences of these decisions. 

Let’s ignore the fact that all the easy and inexpensive highways have already been built.

Let's ignore the fact that very little economic benefit occurs by expanding existing highways.

Let’s ignore the costly and intrusive private property acquisition necessary to expand highways in developed areas.

Let’s ignore the incredible expense of highway construction today, but at the same time continue to stigmatize energy efficient public transportation solutions as too costly.

Let’s ignore the increased accidents, injuries and fatalities associated with highway expansion and increased motor vehicle travel.

Let’s ignore the air quality degradation as a direct result of vehicle emissions and fugitive dust associated with highway expansion and increased motor vehicle travel.

Let’s ignore the water quality degradation associated with highway expansion and increased motor vehicle travel.

Let's ignore the increased use of traction sand and Mag Chloride that occurs with highway expansion and increased motor vehicle travel along with the air and water pollution that results.

Let’s ignore the ridiculous noise level associated with the current I-70 highway and its impact to the mountain corridor communities.

Let's ignore the noise associated with highway expansion and increased motor vehicle travel.

Let’s ignore the health and community impacts associated with highway expansion and increased motor vehicle travel.

Let’s ignore the obesity problems associated with auto-dependent and auto-priority development fueled by highway expansion and at the same time discourage pedestrian, bicycle and public transportation facilities.

Let’s ignore the increased demand for State Patrol Resources, Incident Management, Emergency Communications, Law Enforcement, Fire Protection and Ambulance, Emergency Medical and Trauma Care services associated with highway expansion and increased motor vehicle travel.

Let’s ignore the increased greenhouse gas emissions associated with highway expansion and increased motor vehicle travel.

Let’s ignore the US transportation’s automobile and truck dependency and its contribution to global climate change. 

Let’s ignore the induced travel impacts of highway expansion that encourage vehicle miles traveled and even more congestion.

Let’s ignore the fact that highway expansion breeds auto-dependent sprawl, increased vehicle miles traveled and more congestion.

Let’s ignore the cost of government service delivery to the dispersed auto-dependent development and sprawl that highway expansion fuels.

Let’s ignore the needs of our increasing senior population for pedestrian friendly and livable communities.

Let’s ignore the fact that as Baby-boomers retire in massive numbers, they will be driving less.

Let’s exaggerate the economic benefits of highway expansion by not taking into account the harmful economic impacts of highway construction, increased foreign fuel consumption and US agricultural land consumption for auto-dependent development and sprawl.

Let’s ignore big business and economic development association’s GREED for more customers and more profits regardless of the environmental and community impacts and consequences to future generations.

Let's ignore the fact that increasing fuel prices, fuel taxes, Vehicle Miles Traveled taxes and tolls will literally drive the middle class away from discretionary travel.

Let’s ignore the legacy of highway maintenance funding deficits we are passing on to our children and grandchildren.

Let's ignore the legacy of environmental, energy and political problems we are passing on to our future generations by our selfish demand for highway expansion and our selfish demand for the right to drive when and where we want to, regardless of cost or impacts.

Let's ignore the fact that highways and independent private motor vehicles as the United State's primary means of transportation are NOT sustainable. 

Click here for the I-70 mountain corridor basics 

There are lots of highway contractors, engineering firms and highway proponents out there looking for highway construction work, regardless of what the people of Colorado want or really need.

Most traffic jams on I-70 relate to construction activities, accidents caused by careless or reckless drivers, bad weather and natural hazards such as rock, snow or mudslides.  Additional highway capacity isn’t going to solve these problems.

 We all know that there is greater peak period travel demand in the I-70 corridor than can be accommodated by the current I-70 facility.  When the cost in terms of travel time (congestion), cost in terms of vehicle operation, (vehicle cost, insurance, fuel, maintenance, tolls, taxes), cost in terms of the travel experience (accidents, natural hazards and dangerous driving conditions) or cost in terms of the destination experience (resort overcrowding, overuse of public lands, environmental degradation, long waiting lines), reaches our personal threshold, we stop making peak period corridor trips, but do not stop making trips altogether.

When the cost of peak period travel becomes too great, we move our trips to non-peak periods.  This can be observed today by the increase in corridor travel on Mondays, Thursdays, Fridays and throughout the entire day on Saturdays and Sundays.  We may also choose closer corridor destinations during peak periods that require a shorter trip, but still provide a valuable recreational experience and produce corridor revenue.

For the I-70 Corridor, expanding capacity either in terms of highway expansion or new public transportation capacity, will most certainly allow more travel during peak periods.  It may also provide for less travel during non-peak periods, since a larger portion of overall trips are being satisfied by peak period capacity.  Of course resort crowding, public land overuse, long lines at restaurants and other attractions or other overcrowding that diminishes the destination experience, will again force corridor visitors to go back to non peak period trips. 

How crowded are resort communities currently during peak periods and how much greater capacity do they wish to accommodate during peak periods?  Has anyone asked the current residents of the resort communities how they feel about additional peak period visits and was this a consideration in either the CDOT/BBC/FHU or Denver Chamber studies?

Expanding highway capacity may not generate a significantly lower level of peak period congestion.  Traffic studies from all over the country point out that once additional highway capacity is made available in a previously congested corridor, many motorists simply change their travel behavior. 

A significant number of those motorists that had been avoiding the corridor during peak periods by taking an alternate route or by using public transportation simply switch back to driving in the expanded highway corridor, until it very quickly reaches the same congestion level as it had before the expansion.  The alternate routes and public transportation will likely see a decrease in use as more motorists use the primary highway corridor, until the highway corridor reaches previous congestion levels. The I-25 TREX expansion is following this pattern.  This pattern facilitates a form of peak period traffic congestion equilibrium that suggests that traffic congestion in high demand corridors is relatively permanent even when capacity is increased.

At a projected cost of $800,000 per hour for I-70 highway closures, imagine the impact of 15 years of I-70 highway expansion construction to corridor resorts and businesses with no effective alternate mode or alternate route in place.  Highway construction itself, without first establishing an alternate mode or alternate route, poses the single biggest threat to corridor commerce and economic growth in the next 20 years, yet is missing from the recent CDOT/BBC/FHU and Denver Chamber studies.  Could this have been done intentionally so as not to discourage future highway construction in the corridor?

Click Here to read about the Power of Green

An I-70 Highway Expansion alternative will Increase:

The number of Vehicles on the Highway in all Weather Conditions

Vehicle Miles Traveled and Congestion

Highway Travel Times

Road Rage Incidents

Accidents

Vehicle - Animal Collisions

Road Maintenance and Resurfacing Costs

Our Reliance on the automobile for mobility regardless of the escalating cost of vehicle fuel, maintenance, ownership and operation

Overuse of our Public Lands

Noise, Air, Water and Visual Pollution

Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Impacts on corridor Historical Properties

Our Dependency on Foreign Oil

Our Ignorance of World Peak Oil production, (Natural Resource Depletion)

Our Ignorance of the State's increasing Senior Population

Our Ignorance of Global Climate Change

Construction Economic Impacts

Back Country Sprawl

In the 21st Century, we will see extensive greenhouse gas restrictions to mitigate global climate change impacts and to protect the world's future.  We will also see considerable depletion of the world's oil and gas reserves. 

Colorado can and must take actions TODAY to mitigate the impacts of global climate change and natural resource depletion and stop creating more problems for our future generations to solve. 

Colorado must be a leader in breaking the United States' addiction to foreign oil and ending our single dimension, highway only transportation philosophy, by investing NOW in renewable energy production and energy efficient rail transportation. 

The Current Road to Transportation Sustainability in the US Today

OR

Congestion is here to stay - click here for more info

Colorado requires a more diverse, robust, transit friendly and multimodal transportation system that better meets the needs of our residents, businesses, children, seniors, students, tourists, employees, pedestrians and cyclists. 

Toll roads are not the universal solution that the Independence Institute, big oil, highway contractors and the Owens/Norton Regime believe they are. 

CDOT has invested considerably in highway infrastructure as their sole transportation solution for Colorado.  CDOT already has more highway miles than they can possibly maintain.   Why would CDOT place such a high priority on building more roads when they cannot afford to maintain the ones they have? 
 

Click Here to Take a look at the "Big Picture"
 

The entrenched highway culture within the CDOT organization is a flashback to the 1950-1960's era when the Interstate Highway System Concept was new and exciting.   

Unfortunately, we are now in the 21st Century and our transportation planners need to wrestle with many unanticipated consequences of highway expansion and auto-oriented development over the past 50 years. 

The US dependency on highways as our primary transportation mode is contributing to greenhouse gas emissions, global climate change, shrinking world oil reserves, US dependency on unstable foreign oil supplies, continued political conflicts and wars over oil, increasing water pollution from highway runoff, increasing air pollution from vehicle emissions and entrained dust from vehicle travel, increasing highway congestion and increasing highway impacts to communities, including health problems.

Our highway investment has accomplished its purpose, but now is the time to invest in other modes of travel and end our gross dependence on highway travel and foreign oil.  Continued highway expansion today brings little benefit in terms of economic productivity and congestion relief.  All of the easy highways have been built.  Adding highway capacity today is in difficult urbanized areas where the construction costs and community impacts will be enormous and horrendous.    

Peak Oil, Global Climate Change, Federal Haze requirements, our aging population and our Winter Tourism Economy should motivate the State's transportation planners to pursue energy efficient and low greenhouse gas emitting transit solutions over continued highway expansion and continued auto-oriented land use and sprawl. 

Sinking endless billions of dollars into highway infrastructure that simply increases Vehicle Miles Traveled and encourages more auto-dependent sprawling development, only results in more traffic, more congestion and more dollars needed for highway maintenance and more dollars needed for additional highway capacity.  This behavior places tremendous burdens on our future generations and is a short-sighted vision that benefits only two industries, big oil and the highway contractors.  

Many factors contribute to automobile dependency and promote a self-reinforcing cycle of increased automobile travel, reduced travel options, and more automobile-oriented transportation and land use policies which result in a high level of automobile dependency in most communities.

As a community becomes more automobile dependent, the people who rely on alternative modes becomes an increasingly small minority, so decision-makers become less familiar with their needs and their political influence declines. As a result, countless public policy and planning decisions become more favorable to automobile travel, and less consideration is given to supporting other modes.

Until recently, public officials and transportation professionals generally considered Automobile Dependency acceptable or even desirable. They assume that Automobile Dependency reflects consumer preferences and is inevitable with increased wealth. They associated automobile travel with comfort, convenience, success and economic development, and alternative modes with deprivation and failure. Most had no experience with efficient, multi-modal transportation systems.

But this assumption is increasingly questioned. Although automobile transportation provides significant benefits to society, these benefits experience diminishing marginal returns. Beyond an optimal level, increased motor vehicle traffic provides little additional benefits, while imposing increasing costs, and reducing the viability of other transport modes. These diminishing marginal benefits occur at both an individual level (although a consumer may benefit from driving 10,000 annual vehicle-miles, few would want to drive 100,000 annual vehicle-miles regardless of how low their financial cost), and at the community level (although a certain amount of vehicle traffic is contributes to economic and social activities, increased vehicle traffic does not necessarily cause more economic and social development). Automobile Dependency is harmful overall because it represents levels of automobile use beyond what is economically and socially optimal (Litman, 2000).

Factors That Contribute to Automobile Dependency

A number of transportation and land use market distortions tend to encourage automobile ownership and use beyond what is economically and socially optimal (Market Principles). These include underpricing, inadequate consumer choice, weak competition, bias in transportation planning and investment practices, and other public policies that favor automobile travel.

 

Conventional Transportation Planning practices can create a self-fulfilling prophecy: past traffic growth rates are extrapolated to predict future vehicle traffic demand, and road and parking capacity is built to meet this projected demand (called predict and provide planning). Little consideration is given to the negative impacts that more dispersed destinations, larger roads and parking facilities, and reduced resources for other travel modes will have on overall Accessibility. The result is increasingly automobile-oriented transportation systems and land use patterns (Condon, 2004). More Comprehensive Planning can help create more balanced transportation systems.

 

Transportation Evaluation practices often favor automobile dependency. Transportation service quality is often Measured primarily in terms of vehicle traffic (e.g., roadway level of service, average traffic speed, vehicle congestion delay), with little or no consideration to other modes. Nonmotorized Transportation tends to be undervalued in conventional transportation surveys and models, which ignore or undercount short trips, travel by children, leisure travel, and walking links to access automobiles and transit service. As a result, few resources are devoted to walking and cycling.

 

Current investment practices also contribute to Automobile Dependency. Transportation funding is often dedicated to roads and parking, and cannot be used for other types of transportation facilities or services, even when they are more cost effective overall. Zoning codes often include minimum parking requirements, which represent a subsidy of automobile travel, and by increasing land requirements, results in lower-density, urban fringe development. Least Cost Transportation Planning, Smart Growth Policy Reforms and Parking Management are TDM strategies that can help correct these distortions.

 

Automobile use is considered Prestigious, while other mode are stigmatized, many urban communities have become unattractive to middle-class residents, and some people assume, incorrectly, that automobile dependency contributes to Economic Development. The public officials and community leaders most involved in transportation planning tend to be automobile dependent, and so are particularly conscious of problems facing motorists and less aware of problems facing people who depend on other modes. This is not to suggest that public officials are unconcerned about the negative impacts of increased vehicle traffic and problems facing non-drivers. Many work hard to improve Transport Options. However, this occurs despite, rather than supported by current transportation evaluation and planning practices.

 

While it may seem harmful to constrain road building just to reduce automobile dependency, a more positive perspective, which often reaches the same conclusion, is that once a community has a basic road system which provides motor vehicle access to most destinations, increasing traffic capacity and speed provides diminishing benefits and increasing costs, so it makes sense to invest an increasing portion of resources in alternative modes and more accessible land use patterns in order to achieve community planning objectives. There is a strong economic case for transportation and land use policies that increase the cost of driving (Market Reforms), reduce sprawl (Land Use Evaluation) and increase Transport Options (Litman, 2000).

 

Is Your Community Addicted to Sprawl? Click here to find out

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How do we Break the Automobile Dependency Cycle?

Our Land Use Management and Transportation Planning practices MUST Change!

We can no longer afford the billions and billions of dollars necessary to keep expanding highways to meet the travel demand for continued low density and auto-oriented development.  

Skyrocketing energy and construction costs as a result of the 2005 hurricanes, political instability in the Middle East and accelerated development in China, demand that we re-think our "business as usual" transportation planning process.

Transportation and Land Use development that encourages Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) is a catalyst for congestion.  Increasing VMT drives congestion and then drives the need for even more highway expansion and highway maintenance, resulting in an exponential demand for highway funding that we CANNOT afford.

This is truly a "no-win" scenario.

Click Here to read a message to Congress relating to our transportation planning deficiencies

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For the I-70 Mountain Corridor
Trains Not Lanes,
Transit Oriented Development and Managed Growth
are the Right Scenario

Stadler FLIRT

 

Colorado Railcar DMU

 

Bombardier ART






General Atomics Inductrack

 

Bombardier ART Skytrain

 

American Maglev

 

 

Colorado Maglev Project 200 Vehicle

 

Transrapid

 

Stadler FLIRT

 

Bombardier ART Airtrain






Bombardier AGC






Bombardier Talent

 

 Bombardier Regina

 

 

LINIMO HSST

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The Colorado Department of Transportation engaged in a Major Investment Study in the 1990's to evaluate solutions to the congestion problem and is now 8 years and $25 plus million dollars into a Programmatic Environmental Impact Study (PEIS), see http://www.i70mtncorridor.com/.

While the Final Version of the PEIS is now scheduled for release in the Fall of 2008, the outlook for mountain corridor congestion relief is not very promising.  The Draft version of the PEIS (released in December 2004) indicates that CDOT would prefer to spend the next 20 years planning and constructing a six lane I-70 Highway facility through Clear Creek County with a 10 mile six lane section from the top of Vail Pass to East Vail and another 4 mile six lane section from West Vail to Eagle-Vail.

If you think you've already experienced your frustration limit on I-70, think again!

 

A 15 year cone zone to facilitate the immense amount of excavation, filling, blasting, tunneling and rock scaling necessary to produce a six lane I-70 facility through the narrow Clear Creek Valley from Floyd Hill to the Continental Divide, will set a ridiculous new pain threshold for I-70 travel including record congestion and delays.

Transportation is not an end in itself; its purpose is to serve common community aspirations for a better quality of life. Unfortunately, transportation is increasingly becoming a threat to quality of life in Colorado, not its handmaiden.  Unless forceful action is taken now to reverse this trend, our quality of life will deteriorate.

Transportation is too important an issue to leave solely to transportation planners.  Effective transportation solutions require partnerships – across agencies, across jurisdictions, and in collaboration with private and non-profit organizations.  Every citizen of the state is a partner in this effort.

 

Today, many transportation agencies at every level (federal, state, county and municipal - except for CDOT) are looking to other ways of dealing with congestion. Instead of focusing on how fast cars can move through a particular place (mobility), DOTs are thinking about how easy it is to reach destinations (access) – by car, as well as by transit, bike or foot.

 

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The intention of this web site is to provide readers with a thorough understanding of the dynamics of the I-70 mountain corridor and introduce a better solution to the current highway congestion problem. 

 

Trains Not Lanes is the right answer!

 

Highway Expansion is the WRONG answer.

 

What does your 21st Century Transportation Vision look like?