I-70 Expansion

I-70 Expansion

I-70 is a highway that many people from Denver use every day. Snowboarders and skier rely on this road every winter. Any snow enthusiast will have a story for how long they have spent in there car between the Eisenhower Tunnel and Denver. It is also used a lot in the summers by many outdoorsmen. The traffic has been a problem for the last half of the decade. Colorado relies on tourist getting up to the mountains so there towns can make money every year. I-70 could discourage people from going up I-70 on the weekends, because they might not want to go because of traffic. Right now Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) is looking in to possible solutions on how to make this road more efficient.

The I-70 is a project in the working with more and more cars traveling to the mountains every year. Joe Garner from the Rocky Mountain news said "The numbers of cars on I-70 have increased by 2 percent a year."(Oct. 1, 2005). With all of this traffic there has to be a solution on how to get this road capable to handle more people. We have to make alternate ways for people to get to the mountains without using their car. It Looking at a few of the solutions to reach the mountains and how the can effect the economics of the towns and ski areas around I-70.

The main solution is to expand I-70 to six lanes in many areas. This will require a lot of work. They will have to drill out a few tunnels including the massive Eisenhower. While the work is in process they will have traffic that can not be rerouted anywhere. I would compare this to the T-Rex but worse. This will be a project that is projected at about 15 years said CDOT. This will be a long project that will be seeing more and more traffic each year. The road expansion could have effects on different areas of the towns and businesses.

The Ski resorts will see the biggest economic effect for this road expansion.

The number of cars in the winter increase dramatically in the winter. In 2004 there were roughly 930,000 cars that traveled through the Eisenhower Tunnel in December (Jane Stebbins Summit Daily News, May 1, 2005). This will be hard on the Vail Resorts that have five ski resorts just past the Eisenhower Tunnel. If construction slows down too much then people will find other places to go skiing beside the Vail Resorts. The resorts bring many