Nowadays, we’re often told that we need more transportation choices.
True, we need them. But, sorry to say, we won’t use them.
I ride my bike a lot, but does anyone really expect that with more bike paths, we’ll see appreciably fewer cars on our roads?
And light rail sure hasn’t changed the world. It’s not a bust, but it’s no indisputable boom, either. On some lines, you’ll sometimes see one, maybe two passengers per carriage.
Why? Because we love our cars. We get in at one place; we get out at another. No fares, no transfers, no sweat.
But if our typical mode of transportation is not going to change, the way we pay for it has to. Why? Because while the Colorado Department of Transportation had $1.6 billion to spend in 2007, today its budget is $400 million less. That’s $800 million short of what CDOT says it needs just to maintain par, which isn’t saying much.
CDOT itself grades the overall condition of more than 9,000 miles of highway across Colorado as only a C-plus.
Yet, as if we can just shut our eyes real tight and wish our weaknesses away, for more than 20 years we haven’t supported an upward adjustment in the gas tax, which is CDOT’s main source of funding. This year, our state legislators finally apportioned money for CDOT after almost a decade of drought, but because of restrictions due to the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, it got only half of what originally was allocated.
The two biggest imperatives for improvement are Interstate 70 and I-25. They are Colorado’s indispensable spinal columns. CDOT’s Communications Director Amy Ford calls them “absolutely critical priorities.” But they also are the biggest chokepoints in the state. They need relief.
Technology is on the cusp of achievable alternatives, but we’re not there yet. So how about adding new lanes until then? The common comeback to that controversial concept is the pessimistic projection, “Build it and they will come.”
Newsflash: They’re coming anyway. Our population is growing at a rate twice the national average. Deflate the mountains and shield the sun, maybe Colorado won’t be the utopia it is and the growth will slow. But we can’t do that, and “they” will come whether we expand our highways or not.
Meantime, the longer we do nothing, not only do our own frustrations grow but also the further we fall from any affordable solution. Right now, the price tag for an asphalt fix along the mountain corridor of I-70 alone — absent any alternative form of transportation, like rail, which would cost more than half of the entire state budget for a whole year — is somewhere between $3 billion and $5 billion. And like everything from the veterans hospital to Denver International Airport, those figures might be on the low side.
A lot of Coloradans are complaining now about a fairly new concept in our state: toll lanes. Not tollways like E-470, but paying a price, a toll, to ride in the fast lane while other lanes — theoretically more congested — cost nothing. It’s just starting now on the Boulder Turnpike. Soon, it will be on eastbound I-70 from Empire to Idaho Springs, and eventually on C-470, I-70 to DIA, and more of I-25 north to Fort Collins.
The strategy is, let drivers who are in a hurry pay for improvements that make hurrying possible. If a toll lane jams up, the toll goes up and some drivers drop out. If it’s underused, the toll goes down and more drivers pull in. Another part of the strategy? State-run express buses to reduce the cars’ congestion.
Colorado roads might never earn an A, but C-plus isn’t anywhere near satisfactory. So I’m all for what the state is doing. There’s no other way to finance what we need … unless the money magically materializes when we shut our eyes real tight.
Greg Dobbs of Evergreen was a correspondent for ABC News for 23 years, then for HDNet television’s “World Report.”
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