The idea struck me a few weeks before I left for Colorado, where I was going to report on the state’s notorious Interstate 70 traffic. Each winter, I-70 makes headlines and stymies skiers attempting to drive from Denver and the urban Front Range to the dozen or so resorts that lie west along the scenic and beleaguered 144-mile mountain corridor. The highway has even inspired its own Instagram account, @i70things, which features scenes of Corvettes squirming in the snow, semis jackknifed across the road, and the cherry-red ass ends of countless vehicles, all filmed by frustrated travelers.
I’ve been mired on I-70 myself, having lived on the Front Range until last year, when I moved back to my home state of California, to the mountains around Lake Tahoe. On my upcoming trip, I hoped to answer some of the questions I’d pondered as a Coloradan: What causes I-70 traffic? Could it ever be fixed? And what did traffic on I-70—and other infamous recreational arteries like Utah’s Little Cottonwood Canyon to Alta and Snowbird ski resorts or the Montauk Highway to Long Island’s beaches—reveal about our relationship with nature? (...)
I briefed my fiancé. He politely lauded my out-of-the-box thinking, but expressed valid concerns, including the offhand chance that I got murdered, or a more likely scenario in which I failed to convince anyone to let some rando into their car. He suggested I arrange a ride in advance.
I took to the keyboard with optimism. “Hi all!” I posted on three Denver-area skiing Facebook groups. “I’m looking for a fun group to hitch a ride with on Saturday January 6. … Looking for folks who were already planning to leave the Front Range at 7 A.M. or later.” I left my phone number, converting a few digits to text (“seven2zero…”) to foil the spam bots, and waited for the invitations to roll in.
The response was swift and derisive.
“That’s literally the worst traffic weekend of the year. Hard pass!” “Anyone leaving at that time of day, on that particular weekend is clearly a sadistic psychopath and should not be trusted to drive you anywhere.” “This is literally the first man [note: I’m a woman] that is actively trying to get stuck on i70.” (...)
I haven’t given up on my dream of a joyride with strangers. Dan and I sense an opening with a pair of thirtysomething dudes bound for Loveland Ski Area. The driver has his window down and gyrates to his music. He wears a big smile that gets bigger when we tell him we’re reporters from Outside. “Cool!” he says. Would he be willing to let me hop into his car? The smile stays fixed, but the eyes dart side to side.
I add, reluctantly, “You can say no.”“OK,” he replies, still smiling. “No.” (...)
If you ask Coloradans what causes I-70 traffic, you’ll get theories about winter weather, curvy mountain roads, and tourists in rental cars. These factors do contribute to backups. But people also seem to intuit the main reason I-70 is congested, which is that it accesses stunning peaks, sprawling public lands, and some of the best ski resorts in the country—and everyone wants to get to them. Experts say it’s simple supply and demand: a highway built in the 1970s now handles traffic from a population that’s nearly tripled and visitorship that keeps growing, fueled in part by Americans’ record participation in outdoor activities. In 1973, when the first bore of what’s now called the Eisenhower-Johnson Memorial Tunnel was completed, 2.4 million cars used it to travel I-70 through the Continental Divide. Last year that number was 13 million. (...)
Travelers bogged on I-70 are known for amusing antics like skiing on the shoulders, doing pushups, or even playing volleyball next to their vehicles; last winter a bluegrass band performed a little outdoor concert for fellow travelers when the road closed. But for the state, I-70 congestion is a serious concern, and has been since at least the early 2000s. The highway is a major thoroughfare for residents and truck commerce, and it’s also crucial to the state’s tourism economy—travelers spend more money along the I-70 mountain corridor than in any region except Denver. The fear that traffic would deter visitors to Colorado’s tourism-based communities was one of the main reasons the nonprofit I-70 Coalition formed in 2004. But those concerns haven’t come to pass, Margaret Bowes, director of the coalition, tells me. Business along the mountain corridor continues to boom, and Colorado ski resorts broke visitor records the past two winters. “People have just come to accept that I-70 traffic is part of the deal if you want to ski or recreate on our mountain corridor,” Bowes says.
Yet what about all the people I know who refuse to drive I-70 on weekends anymore, who gave up skiing or even left Colorado altogether because they couldn’t deal with traffic? Bowes has talked to many of those people too. “But,” she says, with dry amusement, “it sure seems like for every one of those folks, another person or two was willing to take their spot.” (...)
Coloradans have long dreamed of a train along the I-70 mountain corridor. Some form of mass transit is in fact part of the Record of Decision, the plan that governs how the state must meet its forecasted 2050 traffic demands on I-70. Also part of the ROD is an additional bore of the Eisenhower Tunnel and expansion of the highway to six-lane capacity. Note the emphasis on capacity rather than six actual lanes, as geography, politics, and finances all limit the potential to widen I-70. Increasing capacity, then, includes projects that aim to move more people on existing infrastructure, such as by converting some wider shoulders into peak-hour traffic lanes.
A new lane or train is also unlikely to reduce traffic on I-70 in the long-term, thanks to a phenomenon called induced demand. Induced demand says that adding capacity to a road—whether through infrastructure like a lane or public transit—will only temporarily relieve congestion. That short-term relief will then induce pent-up demand—for example, when all those people who haven’t been skiing in ages hear that traffic isn’t too bad anymore decide to try again—and eventually the road is just as congested as it was. The ROD doesn’t even claim that a train would reduce the number of cars on the road; mass transit is just expected to bring more people up to the mountains. According to induced demand, every driver who decides to take transit will eventually be replaced by another in their car. (...)
Over Martin Luther King weekend, storms battered Colorado. CDOT warned that travel would be “difficult to impossible,” but the holiday-goers and powder seekers went anyway. The combination of humanity and snowfall broke I-70. Multiple passes closed. Hundreds of vehicles spun out. Skiers reported eight-hour drives home. Stranded travelers overwhelmed Silverthorne, swarming gas stations and driving onto sidewalks in a scene one resident described as “apocalyptic.”
Why did these people go? I wondered, as I scrolled through the endless reel of chaos on @i70things. But I already knew, because I, too, had once passed beers to strangers in cars crawling alongside mine on I-70 after a ski day, had squatted peeing between a friend’s idling car and a guardrail mid-snowstorm. We’re all here for such a short time, and so little of that time is ours. How could we ask anyone not to spend their precious turn on this planet chasing whatever taps the dopamine dispensers in their brain?
Traffic is not a Colorado phenomenon, or a Western individualist one, or even an American one. It follows beauty, choking the roads from Lake Tahoe to Cape Cod. It springs from affluence, overwhelming Beijing, where a newly burgeoned middle class rushed to purchase cars as soon as they could afford them. It resists regulation, plaguing Mexico City, where some have bought two cars to thwart a law that allows only those with certain plates to drive certain days. Perhaps no observable phenomenon defines us more as a species than traffic: every one of us acting in our own self-interest, getting in one another’s way while we pursue the same things.
Traffic is not a Colorado phenomenon, or a Western individualist one, or even an American one. It follows beauty, choking the roads from Lake Tahoe to Cape Cod. It springs from affluence, overwhelming Beijing, where a newly burgeoned middle class rushed to purchase cars as soon as they could afford them. It resists regulation, plaguing Mexico City, where some have bought two cars to thwart a law that allows only those with certain plates to drive certain days. Perhaps no observable phenomenon defines us more as a species than traffic: every one of us acting in our own self-interest, getting in one another’s way while we pursue the same things.
by Gloria Liu, Outside | Read more:
Images: Daniel Brenner
[ed. I got stuck one year when the pass closed down due to heavy snowfall. Spent all night with the engine running to keep warm. Stepping out to pee, I had to push against three feet of new snow to even get the door open (worse if you went off the road shoulder). So, twelve hours later...finally through the tunnel, my new tire chains disintegrated and I almost got run over by a semi while laying in slush next to the roadway, trying to rip them off my axle. Good times. We have the same problem here in Washington state, with I-90 going east/west in and out of Seattle through Snoqualmie Pass in the Cascades. Unpredictable in the winter, you never know if or when it'll close; but for sure, every Sunday summer afternoon expect returning traffic to be miles long, bumper to bumper. For more great outdoor adventures (ha), see also: Why Does Yellowstone National Park Turn Us All into Maniacs? (Outside).]
And I am legion. The U.S. has a near-infinite supply of clueless tourists such as myself, much to the dismay of our National Park Service. Yellowstone, our most famous national park thanks to Kevin Costner, welcomes 4.5 million of us each year. Like all of our parks, Yellowstone takes in tourists not only for the revenue but to remind them that the physical country they reside in is a marvel well beyond their comprehension. As such, Yellowstone is set up to accommodate these hordes. And while park officials do their best to keep tourists in line, often literally, my kind still manage to do plenty of tourist shit. We trample plant life. We get shitfaced and pick unwinnable fights with animals ten times our size. And we hurt ourselves. According to NPS data, at least 74 people have died while visiting Yellowstone in the past 15 years. I could have been one of those people. I deserve to be one of those people.
This is why Outside sent me to the park just a few weeks ago, during one of the busiest times of the year. They wanted me to observe our most basic tourists in the wild. Maybe I’d even get to see one die. Or, even better for my editors, maybe I would die while I was there. Maybe I’d look down my nose at the tourists around me only to end up as wolf food myself. Like most other Yellowstone visitors, I was not trained for the outdoors, I relish doing shit that posted signs yell at me not to do, and I often daydream about fighting bears (and winning!). I find danger tempting, which isn’t a good thing given that I can no longer swim a single pool lap without taking a break. Are people like me responsible enough to visit one of our national treasures without breaking it? Do we, as a population, know how to do national parks?
There was only one way to find out: by going into the park and behaving like an idiot.
***
Nothing screams “tourist” more than being a big, stupid American.And I am legion. The U.S. has a near-infinite supply of clueless tourists such as myself, much to the dismay of our National Park Service. Yellowstone, our most famous national park thanks to Kevin Costner, welcomes 4.5 million of us each year. Like all of our parks, Yellowstone takes in tourists not only for the revenue but to remind them that the physical country they reside in is a marvel well beyond their comprehension. As such, Yellowstone is set up to accommodate these hordes. And while park officials do their best to keep tourists in line, often literally, my kind still manage to do plenty of tourist shit. We trample plant life. We get shitfaced and pick unwinnable fights with animals ten times our size. And we hurt ourselves. According to NPS data, at least 74 people have died while visiting Yellowstone in the past 15 years. I could have been one of those people. I deserve to be one of those people.
This is why Outside sent me to the park just a few weeks ago, during one of the busiest times of the year. They wanted me to observe our most basic tourists in the wild. Maybe I’d even get to see one die. Or, even better for my editors, maybe I would die while I was there. Maybe I’d look down my nose at the tourists around me only to end up as wolf food myself. Like most other Yellowstone visitors, I was not trained for the outdoors, I relish doing shit that posted signs yell at me not to do, and I often daydream about fighting bears (and winning!). I find danger tempting, which isn’t a good thing given that I can no longer swim a single pool lap without taking a break. Are people like me responsible enough to visit one of our national treasures without breaking it? Do we, as a population, know how to do national parks?
There was only one way to find out: by going into the park and behaving like an idiot.
