Tag: High-speed Rail

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).

As the premier of British Columbia, Gordon Campbell gets a lot of credit for pulling off the successful 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver despite a global recession and challenging weather. As a state lawmaker and later Democratic governor of Colorado, Dick Lamm gets a lot of the blame for torpedoing the public financing for the 1976 Winter Olympics in Denver. The two will debate the question “Should Colorado bid for Olympic Games?” at a symposium in Vail on Tuesday.

Government officials from Vail to the Front Range foothills agree it will take an Olympian effort to fix winter weekend skier traffic snarls and summer tourism gridlock on Interstate 70 between Denver and Colorado’s most popular mountain resorts. But with a price tag of $9 billion for high-speed rail from Denver to Vail, some observers say it will literally take the Winter Olympics coming to Colorado to secure the federal and state funds needed to make the rail solution a reality.

Under the headline “Myth: Interstate 70 traffic jams worst during ski season,” the Denver Post Tuesday ran an AP story in which the Colorado...

Some backers of intercity passenger rail in Colorado think that instead of a $21 billion high-speed system along the I-70 and I-25 corridors a slower-speed test rail line using existing tracks should first be built in the mountains.

The stories from Front Range weekend warriors of typical two-hour drives on Interstate 70 turned into six-hour odysseys by jackknifed semis and brutal mountain...

Local rail and public transit enthusiasts are in for a cold slap of reality after the historic signing of the $787 billion economic recovery plan. During Tuesday's visit to Denver with President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden said the federal stimulus bill will be a big boost to mass transit in the United States, with funding impacts for commuter rail projects from Colorado to Amtrak's Northeast Corridor.

If you're a fan of high-speed rail, which in this country pretty much limits you to the Northeast corridor between New York and Washington,...