A promising “speed harmonization” program to smooth eastbound travel on Interstate 70 in the mountains west of Denver hit a sour note Sunday afternoon.
Traffic on I-70 so overwhelmed the Colorado Department of Transportation’s pace-car program that the agency opted to suspend it for the weekend.
We hope they bring it back and, thankfully, are told that’s what CDOT intends to do.
“Right now we still believe there’s value in the program,” CDOT spokeswoman Stacey Stegman told us. “The simple fact is we’re trying to find that really good time to run it. It’s new, it’s experimental, and it’s never been done in these conditions for this type of highway.”
The idea behind the pilot program — unveiled last summer — is that moving traffic at a slower, steadier speed through the bottlenecked mountain corridor reduces accidents, tailgating and lane changes that can ultimately cause larger traffic tie-ups.
No, the pace car program is not a silver bullet for weekend traffic woes, but it has been successful at improving overall travel times — until last Sunday.
Last week, the agency learned that there are times on the stretch of mountain highway when traffic volume paces itself to the point of near standstill. Sunday — with people returning from the X Games in Aspen and from ski resorts that had received their first significant snowfall of the year — was one of them.
A total of 43,953 vehicles passed through the Eisenhower Tunnel, compared to 42,590 the same weekend last year, CDOT reported.
Rather than see the “paced” traffic come to a halt in the tunnel, CDOT stopped, or “metered,” traffic on the west side of the tunnel. That practice is intended to maintain access for emergency vehicles should it be required.
While last weekend was a clunker, the pace-car program has shown promise on less-intense weekends, improving travel time between the tunnel and C-470 by nearly an hour over comparable winter weekends last year. Anecdotally, it also has kept people from using frontage roads through Clear Creek County.
We’d like to see it continue.
This is a pilot program, after all, and it’s important for transportation officials to have a broad understanding of the conditions — winter and summer — during which the system seems to work and those, like last week, when it fails.
