The seemingly endless studying of what ails the Interstate 70 corridor between Denver and Colorado’s mountain resort communities has started feeling a bit like the snarled driving nightmare common on mid-winter Sunday afternoons. The process inches forward at a glacial rate as the traffic just keeps building.

But state and federal regulators seem buoyed by achieving at least one milestone on Thursday, as the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) signed a Record of Decision (ROD) for the Interstate 70 Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS).

Bureaucratically speaking, that means that after 20 years of studies the feds have finally signed off on the Colorado Department of Transportation’s (CDOT) planning framework for improving the often-gridlocked corridor between its intersection with C-470 in the Denver metro area and the mountain town of Glenwood Springs in Garfield County – a distance of about 160 miles.

“The dedication of many stakeholders working together has brought us to this point of having a Tier 1 Record of Decision,” FHWA’s Colorado Division Administrator John Cater said in praising the hard-fought deal. “We all need to continue working together in this same spirit as we implement future transportation improvements in the mountain corridor.”

The first draft of the PEIS that the feds just signed off on was issued in 2004, but the process was stalled when various stakeholders balked over the costs associated with major upgrades along the corridor, and the fact that – during the Republican Owens administration – the plan didn’t include any kind of rail alternative, and the overall concept of trying to pave the problem away by six-laning I-70 through small mountain towns and sensitive alpine environments.

That led to a reboot of the process in 2007, the formation of the I-70 Collaborative Effort (CE) – made up of 27 stakeholder groups along the corridor – and ultimately a preferred alternative that included at least the possibility of some sort of advanced guideway rail system.

“Implementing the CE process was crucial and a great example of what can be accomplished when everyone comes together to improve our transportation system,” CDOT Executive Director Don Hunt said in a release.

The nuts and bolts highway improvements are entirely contingent on very limited state and federal highway funding and still may be years, if not decades, away from becoming reality. But here they are, according to a CDOT release:

• Six lanes from Floyd Hill through the Twin Tunnels, including a bike trail and frontage roads from Idaho Springs east to Hidden Valley and Hidden Valley to U.S. 6
• Empire Junction (U.S. 40/I-70) improvements
• Eastbound auxiliary lane from the Eisenhower Johnson Memorial Tunnel (EJMT) to Herman Gulch
• Westbound auxiliary lane from Bakerville to the EJMT
• CDOT will begin studying an Advanced Guideway System (AGS) in the corridor this summer.

CDOT already funded a high-speed rail study to the tune of $1.5 million that concluded it will cost more than $21 billion for such a system along both the I-70 corridor and Interstate 25 on the Front Range. The study envisioned fares of up to $40 one way between Denver and Vail. That’s better than what van services currently charge for a similar trip, but still a fairly steep price.

It’s a lot cheaper to build high-speed rail along the relatively flat Front Range corridor where the vast majority of the state’s population lives, costing about $6 billion. Denver International Airport over the Eisenhower Tunnel to Summit County, where the majority of Coloradans and visitors ski every weekend, would cost about $9 billion. Extending it on over Vail Pass to the Eagle Country Regional Airport in Eagle County would likely cost another $7 billion.

The good news, if you’re a passenger rail fan, is the Obama administration is pushing very hard for high speed trains. The bad news is that push isn’t happening in Colorado, which doesn’t have the population density needed to justify such huge federal expenditures.

Some observers have argued the only way Colorado may see high-speed rail into the mountains is a 2022 Winter Olympic bid.

Meanwhile, the various user groups – from truckers to skiers — will no doubt continue to battle over what will fix the growing gridlock along the state’s key east-west corridor between the population centers of the Front Range and the mountain resort playgrounds where all those people love to recreate.

“FASTER enables Colorado to fix crumbling bridges and ensure the safety of the traveling public,” said Pam Hutton, chief engineer at the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT). “Safe and efficient operation of our transportation system is a linchpin of our Colorado way of life.”

HB 1084 would have rolled back the mandatory vehicle registration late fees of up to $100 imposed under FASTER – a stopgap funding measure that in 2009 increased overall registration fees to pay for repairs to 128 structurally deficient bridges in the state. Republicans have relentlessly hammered on FASTER as an unfair tax increase during an ongoing recession, frequently using it on the campaign trail in recent elections.

However, there have been few concrete proposals for finding permanent revenue sources to make up serious CDOT budget shortfalls. The state agency says it needs another $500 million a year just to get Colorado roads back to an acceptable baseline level of repair and upkeep.

FASTER, pre-recession, was supposed to bring in an additional $250 million a year. It’s fallen short of those projections but has still made a serious dent in critical road and bridge repairs, according to CDOT officials. And FASTER backers also say it’s helped create jobs.

“FASTER has created or saved about 7,000 jobs since its passage in 2009,” said Tony Milo, executive director of the Colorado Contractors Association. “House Bill 1084 would have eliminated a significant portion of these jobs just when the economy is starting to show signs of improvement.”

One of the state's worst bridges is this section of Interstate 70 in Denver. (Photo by Joseph Boven)

CDOT officials say they need another $500 million a year just to get to an acceptable level of road and bridge repairs and maintenance statewide, and an unpopular vehicle registration fee hike passed in 2009 – the Funding Advancements for Surface Transportation and Economic Recovery (FASTER) bill – hasn’t even made a dent.

“In this economy, raising taxes to pay for highways would be a nonstarter,” said state Sen. Al White, R-Hayden. “I don’t think the citizens would go for that and that’s why I don’t think you’ve heard any politicians talk about transportation, because they don’t have any solutions. So if you don’t have a solution, better to just not bring it up.”

White, who isn’t up for reelection in November, said FASTER (a Tea Party target viewed by many as backdoor tax by the legislature) was supposed to bring in an additional $250 million a year. But collections have been lagging because of the recession, with fewer people registering new cars and trucks.

“The FASTER dollars that we passed were supposed to be only half of what we minimally needed,” White said. “CDOT said we need a half a billion minimally to maintain a grade C level maintenance on our highways, and that it was closer to a billion to do it in a way that we could be proud of, and I don’t see those dollars coming from anywhere.”

State Rep. Christine Scanlan, D-Dillon, who is running for reelection and whose district is bisected by one of the state’s worst choke points – Interstate 70 – said it will be up to the next governor to make transportation a priority.

“FASTER is a Band-aid under any circumstances; it wasn’t a fix,” Scanlan said. “Whoever is governor is going to have to confront how do you rank transportation versus education, versus health care, versus some of the other general fund tensions. The legislature can only do so much without the governor saying, ‘This is a priority.’”

Scanlan said it will then take a bipartisan effort in the legislature to come up with a package of funding options that will be palatable to Colorado voters. A number of controversial solutions have been floated – from increased tolling to charging motorists by the Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) to raising the state gas tax – but none are likely to be popular.

“Or if it’s something different, because I actually don’t think Vehicle Miles Traveled has a chance,” Scanlan said. “The gas tax, those are declining revenues with more fuel-efficient vehicles, so maybe there’s [another] solution we haven’t figured out yet.”

So far the most substantive transportation discussion in the governor’s race — which pits Democratic Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper against GOP nominee and Tea Party favorite Dan Maes and third-party candidate Tom Tancredo – has centered on improving skier traffic between Denver and the mountain resorts along I-70.

Hickenlooper suggested semi-trailer traffic should be curtailed during peak skier periods such as Friday afternoon, Saturday morning (westbound) and Sunday afternoon (eastbound). That idea is unpopular with the trucking lobby but attractive to the ski industry.

Another idea being studied by CDOT is installing “zipper lanes,” or temporary lane dividers, that would increase the number of eastbound lanes to three on Sunday afternoons while restricting westbound traffic to one lane. Estimated to cost between $30 million and $35 million, zipper lanes would cut travel time eastbound between Silver Plume and El Rancho in half, while doubling the travel time westbound.

Predictably, zipper lanes are favored by the ski industry but viewed with some concern by the trucking lobby.

“There’s no silver bullet solution for I-70,” said Melanie Mills, president and CEO of state ski industry lobby Colorado Ski Country USA. “We think the zipper lanes are a promising near-term measure that will improve the eastbound user experience significantly on Sundays. We support implementing the zipper lane assuming important issues such as snow removal and emergency services can be addressed.”

Greg Fulton of the Colorado Motor Carriers Association trucking lobby says his members aren’t totally adverse to the idea but need to know more.

“We’re waiting like everyone else to see some of the results [of more CDOT study] and how it would work,” Fulton said. “On our end, we’re having vehicles in both directions. The only thing we get concerned with is that we don’t adversely affect that other direction, and that’s going to be part of that study.”

Besides improving the flow of traffic – CDOT has spent about $30 million over the last decade studying the environmental impacts of upgrading I-70 – there is the arguably more immediate issue of road and bridge repairs along the corridor.

One of the state's 128 structurally deficient bridges. (Photo by Joseph Boven)

Between Glenwood Springs and the Front Range foothills there are eight structurally deficient bridges along I-70 that are rated in poor condition – four in Clear Creek County, three in Eagle County and one in Garfield County – and none are currently being repaired.

Of the 128 “poor” bridges statewide, only nine are currently under construction using FASTER dollars, although another dozen or so are being repaired using American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (stimulus) funds.

“The reason we didn’t do more is that there was a requirement for stimulus dollars to be spent quickly on shovel ready projects, so there are many resurfacing projects as well,” said CDOT spokeswoman Stacey Stegman. “It’s easier to design a resurfacing project than a bridge project, so we had more of those.

“We are still on the tail end of the stimulus — as those funds are on a reimbursement basis — so we have about another year to go of that work. After that, though, it’s going to be tough.”

According to the story, CDOT “says the ski jams are something of a myth and that the highway is actually more congested in summer.” July and August are the busiest months, with nearly 40,000 vehicles a day passing through the Eisenhower Tunnel both months. March, January and February are the next busiest months.

So the point is, Front Range day skiers need to quit whining about winter weekend traffic jams on I-70. But the thing about summer is it doesn’t typically include a foot of snow, howling winds and long-haul truckers from Texas with no tire chains going sideways on Vail Pass.

Those are the conditions at 10,000-plus feet of elevation that can turn a two-hour scenic drive through the mountains into a grueling six-hour odyssey. Still, is it bad enough to warrant a $22 billion high-speed rail system crisscrossing the state, as some train backers propose?

Probably not in any of our lifetimes … unless Denver lands the 2022 Winter Olympics, which some observers say may be the only way the state ever gets high-speed mountain rail.

The state Senate today passed SB 196 (pdf), which dictates vehicles must travel at least 10 mph below the posted speed limit in the left lane on Interstate 70 hills with a 6-percent grade. Failure to do so or move over into the right lane will earn drivers a $19 ticket. Now the bill, sponsored by Sen. Dan Gibbs (D-Silverthorne) and Rep. Christine Scanlan (D-Dillon), moves to the House.

The bill is meant to ease congestion on I-70, the main east-west corridor between the Front Range and Western Slope, which becomes a westbound parking lot on Friday evenings and Saturday mornings as city dwellers escape to the mountains. The reverse is true on Sunday evenings.

Scanlan and Gibbs also co-sponsored SB 184 (pdf), which urges the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) to install moveable “zipper lanes” by next ski season along a 15-mile section of I-70 between Georgetown and Floyd Hill.

The moveable barriers would allow CDOT to establish three lanes of westbound traffic and just one lane of eastbound traffic during peak hours Friday and Saturday and then reverse the process for returning traffic at peak times Sunday evening.

“People from the Front Range want to enjoy the mountains and people in the mountains understand how important tourism is to their economies,” Scanlan said in a release. “The prospect of a four-hour drive ends up costing our state more than just time.”

A 2007 Denver Metro Chamber study concluded the state loses $839 million a year in tourism and business revenue due to I-70 gridlock.

CDOT is already conducting a study on the proposal, and officials said they don’t need a state law to make it happen, but lawmakers content the bill will make it easier to sell the plan to the federal government.

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As first revealed by the Colorado Independent Friday, a nearly $1.5 million high-speed rail study conducted by the intergovernmental Rocky Mountain Rail Authority (RMRA) envisions high-speed passenger service along both the Interstate 25 and Interstate 70 corridors costing more than $21 billion at build-out.

The RMRA’s Harry Dale speculated the federal government could be expected to chip in 50 percent or more depending on the political landscape and the cost of gasoline in the decades to come. Colorado residents would likely have to vote to tax themselves to pay for the rest of the capital costs.

But if the phased system of dedicated tracks is built on state or federally owned highway right-of-ways and stays away from existing freight railroad corridors, he said trains would be able to reach speeds high enough to entice people out of their cars on increasingly congested roads and pay premium fares. Then a private company could operate the system at a profit and public operational subsidies would be avoided.

More details of the plan emerged this week, with fares projected at about 35 cents a mile, or just under $40 one way from Denver to Vail or Denver to Pueblo, and revelations that the first phase would likely be DIA to downtown Denver. The report itself contains many alternatives and took 18 months of fact finding to compile.

But the bottom line is that high-speed rail remains an elusive goal for many passenger rail buffs in Colorado, and the Obama administration is doing little to instill confidence in high-speed rail nationwide.

The infrastructure planning group America 2050 conducted a study called “Where High Speed Rail Works Best” that doesn’t have any pair of Colorado cities in its top 50. And the New York Times recently listed a slew of concerns about $1.25 billion in stimulus funding awarded a proposed high-speed rail line between Tampa and Orlando, Fla.

Many rail experts agree that the best place to put high-speed passenger service is in highly congested urban corridors along the East and West coasts, not in much less densely populated areas like the interior West.

But even in corridors such as Boston to Washington, D.C., Dale said the Obama administration is relying on decision makers who do not view passenger rail as a high priority and for years have shunted it off to existing rail infrastructure that is weighted heavily toward moving freight.

“When you really think about our transportation modes, we fly and we drive,” Dale said. “Nobody rides a train anywhere, so you’ve got a very small group of decision makers that have really set policy for passenger rail in this country for many, many years, and they are not mainstream.”

Throwing $8 billion in federal stimulus money at upgrading slow-moving Amtrak rail corridors, with heavy passenger cars and curvy tracks better suited for freight, makes little sense, Dale said, because dedicated high-speed lines would result in speeds that compete favorably with airlines and automobiles.

“So now that the Obama administration sort of lit up the whole high-speed rail conversation, this small non-mainstream group has said, ‘Well, OK, here’s our policy,’ and as you try and bring that into the mainstream you realize there are some real problems with it.”

Freight rail companies want to be absolved of liability for passenger service either sharing their tracks or located adjacent to their tracks. They also charge exorbitant fees to cover that liability and the cost of servicing lines they want to keep open for increasing amounts of freight as interstate trucking costs continue to rise along with fuel prices.

“Obama, because he’s so focused on health care and other things he’s working on, says, ‘Well, we’ll just let these railroad guys take care of this,’ without understanding that these guys have been nowhere near the mainstream for so long that they’ve got their own culture, and in order to bring it into the mainstream it’s got to change and it’s got to change a lot,” Dale said.

One of the only ways Colorado may ever be in the mix for any kind of intercity passenger rail network, some experts say, would be to make it part of a bid for the 2022 Winter Olympics. But that concept comes with a whole other set of issues.

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The RMRA’s Harry Dale, speaking ahead of today’s release of a $1.5 million feasibility study funded mostly by the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT), said the higher cost of building dedicated lines rather than using existing freight lines or right-of-ways makes long-term financial sense.

High-speed trains traveling in excess of 100 mph would command premium fares allowing for a model of $2 in fare revenue for every $1 of operational costs. That means a private company could operate a Colorado franchise at a profit, eliminating the need for annual operational subsidies.

Upgrading freight railroad tracks or building adjacent tracks in freight rail corridors would be cheaper in terms of capital costs, but the system would run at a huge deficit requiring taxpayer subsidies, Dale said. And ridership would suffer because passenger trains traveling on freight lines go much slower and don’t necessarily wind up where people want to go.

“[Freight lines] were never designed for moving passengers at high speeds to the destinations people want to go to,” Dale said. “In the West, our cities and towns are newer and we’ve really grown up along highway corridors in the last 50 years, and the railroad corridors are where they were before the highways.”

That means they go to industrial areas, freight distribution centers or power plants. A passenger train using existing freight corridors near I-25, for instance, could stop in Littleton and Castle Rock, but would miss the Tech Center. A dedicated high-speed rail line could stop in Lone Tree and connect to existing Regional Transportation District (RTD) light rail at Lincoln Avenue.

Another problem with using freight lines is the railroad companies charge heavily to use their tracks or even be near their tracks — a problem RTD ran into when negotiating light-rail right-of-ways. And the freight companies want to be absolved of liability in case of collisions or derailments.

The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) requires “buff-strength compliant trains” that can survive such accidents, whereas European and Asian passenger trains have crumple zones that allow for lighter construction that can absorb the energy of collisions. They can also tilt and therefore travel at higher speeds on the curvier tracks freight trains use.

Heavier, sturdier trains means slower speeds. Upgrading freight lines on the Front Range to 110 mph systems (on which Euro-style trains could travel an average of 50 to 60 mph) would cost $3 billion. The current system is only rated 79 mph, which means passenger trains could only travel 25 to 30 mph, which is prohibitive over long distances.

And even upgrading to 110 requires using currently non-compliant Euro-style trains like the Spanish Talgo T-21, meaning there would need to be significant FRA rule changes.

“When you take the 100,000 foot view of this, you say, ‘Why on earth would we want to use freight railway right of ways for passenger rail service,’” Dale said.

“Leave them alone. Let them run freight trains. There’s a great benefit in moving freight on rail, and if we’re going to build passenger rail infrastructure, let’s build it in the highway corridors and on state-owned or federally-owned highway right-of-ways.”

The cost of dedicated, high-speed passenger rail along I-25 is $6 billion. High-speed rail from Denver International Airport to the Eagle County Regional Airport 40 miles west of Vail would be $16 billion. An alternative is DIA to Summit County, where the majority of Front Range day-skier traffic goes, which would cost $9 billion.

Using freight rail lines and heavy Amtrak-style passenger cars works in some corridors on the East and West Coasts because distances are relatively short and traveling 30 mph is still better than sitting in impenetrable gridlock on the highways.

But longer commuter routes out into the suburbs, especially in the much more spread-out West, makes such speeds problematic for the kind of realistic ridership needed to sustain such a system. The Obama administration, Dale said, needs to change its thinking on passenger rail.

“The corridors themselves as a wide swath makes sense, but using freight railroad alignments in those corridors is where you’re problem is. You will never get true high-speed rail if you’re sharing track with American freight trains. The two are not even compatible.”

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Kopp described his “gotcha” moment when he nailed CDOT chief Russ George on the fact that FASTER, the bill that jacked up vehicle registration fees to pay for the bridge fixes and is a favorite Republican election-year rallying cry, will not have funded a single bridge fix until construction begins on one next month.

Sen. Mike Kopp

“It was an absolute farce … It is a problem from a public trust standpoint,” Kopp told members of the joint and House and Senate Transportation Committee during a hearing Tuesday, according to the release. “The bill was positioned as a way to fix bridges that were in urgent need of repair and to create jobs.”

First of all, had Kopp read the Colorado Independent on Jan. 11, he would have known that FASTER is lagging in collections (mostly because the recession has torpedoed new car purchases) and that the bridge projects were just starting to come into the pipeline.

He also could have read a week earlier that some in his own party like Sen. Al White, with the backing of Dems like Gail Schwartz, are planning to tweak FASTER in order to do away with late fees, and he could have joined the dialogue on coming up with a long-term transportation funding source, something previous GOP-controlled legislatures have failed to do for years (not just a Dem failing).

While it is troubling that so many bridges in such dire straits remain unrepaired, one assumes they haven’t improved any on their own in the last six months, and certainly jobs are just as hot a commodity as they were last summer.

Nothing in the Kopp release either about how the minority would fund the fixes should they regain the majority and yank FASTER. Maybe more tolling around the state? Take more money away from K-12 education? Let’s see how that debate goes in the current economic climate.

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Funding Advancements for Surface Transportation and Economic Recovery (FASTER) upped registration fees and late fees for failing to register, all in the interest of raising money to fix 125 structurally unsound bridges around the state. Democrat Gail Schwartz, D-Snowmass Village, in an article in the Aspen Times over the weekend, said she’s eyeing “tweaking” at least the fine portion of a bill she helped push through last session.

Sen. Gail Schwartz

No one disputes the idea that fixing crumbling bridges and roads is a good idea, but since lawmakers for years have failed to find a permanent funding source to keep up on basic maintenance and upgrades for the state’s road system, FASTER was seen by Democrats as a necessary evil.

Now it turns out the program is lagging in even collecting the projected $250 million a year, and, according to the Colorado Department of Transportation, none of the bridges have been fixed yet.

“Yes, it’s true the FASTER revenues are coming in lower than projected,” CDOT spokeswoman Stacey Stegman told the Colorado Independent. “For example, the bridge fund was originally projected to bring in $50.6 million in [fiscal year] ’10. We now anticipate $45.6 million.

“We haven’t started construction of any of the FASTER bridges yet as most are in design. We weren’t expecting to begin construction until late spring or summer. Basically, it just means that we’ll not be able to do as many this year. We never had a definite plan though anyway, just a list of candidate projects.”

Stegman added that the Bridge Enterprise Board is also looking at other ways to fund the bridge repairs – including bonding and bundling projects — for future years.

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Monarch Mountain (Flickr, zachd1 618)

In 1939 — the year all three ski areas were born — the Great Depression had pushed the state’s biggest industries, agriculture and mining, into the dumps. The government was searching for ways to jump-start the anemic economy and give people work. Almost anything was on the table.

And so, when a growing number of ski fanatics suggested that, with a little help, they could turn the new sport into “white gold” that would attract millions in tourist dollars to Colorado, state leaders were eager to help.

According to the article, in 1939, the town of Salida pitched the Works Progress Administration on a rope tow and shelter house for a steep run called Gun Barrel—to the tune of $26,406.

“Gun Barrel was legendary for how steep it was,” said [Duane] Vandenbusche. “Few people made it down standing.”

[Wally] Koster said there were no safety precautions on the rope tow except a sign at the top reading “Let go or else!”

Meanwhile, skiing was growing increasingly popular at Wolf Creek, thanks to a Colorado Department of Transportation decision to keep Wolf Creek pass plowed. In 1938, the Civilian Conservation Corps built a shelter cabin on the hill, which acted as a lodge.

The Forest Service would not allow anyone to sell snacks in the lodge, so a man from the San Luis Valley set up a grill outside and passed burgers and soda pop through a window.

It almost kind of makes you think that Warren Miller may have been right. Writing for New West last February, he bemoaned the $650 million earmarked to help Americans switch from analog television sets to digital—and suggested instead that the money should be used to get Americans out and skiing.

I have written before about this simple idea to get more people skiing, but now everyone would be doing their patriotic chore while getting their friends to learn an entirely new sport. The skis do not have to be the high-tech $800 model, but something with a lot of side cut so they turn easily and hang on to the manmade snow; like a mountain goat on an icy rock. This $650 million being spent on ski equipment could create about 200 million more winter sport enthusiasts. Instead of the new communicable virus that has just been discovered called the “obesity virus,” the newest disease would be the “sunburned gums from smiling and aching muscle virus.”

Imagine if [a] company could manufacture a ski that would only last for three seasons, instead of the 15 or 20 seasons that they now last, and retail at under $150 with bindings. Use federal bailout funds to supply every ski resort in America with 200 pair of these skis, plastic ski boots and poles and make them available for only $10 a day including the lift ticket. The only catch would be that they could only be used on the beginner’s chairlift. Everything would be color coordinated: lift towers, skis and boots. In today’s depressed economy you could easily convince some friends to take up the sport for $10 a day instead of the more than $100 a day it now costs.

You’ve got at least a few days off now—so get out there, do your patriotic duty, and take some turns!

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