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The Colorado Division of Wildlife is looking for two, maybe three potential Darwin Award recipients who bought hamburgers and cheeseburgers at the Burger King in Eagle on Wednesday and hand fed them to a mother black bear and her three cubs.
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).
While the battle over controversial FASTER vehicle registration fees rages on in the state House, Rep. Millie Hamner, D-Dillon – whose legislative predecessors made a priority of transportation funding – is pushing hard to find solutions for the growing gridlock along the Interstate 70 corridor.
With Colorado’s recession-plagued budget crisis as a backdrop, there’s been very little meaningful debate this election season about one of the most critical issues facing the state: how to fund desperately needed repairs for Colorado’s crumbling roads and bridges.
VAIL -- We all know who wins when an SUV loaded with skiers tangles with a tractor trailer out on the open road on an icy winter day in the Rocky Mountains. The resulting carnage sometimes shuts down high-country highways for hours at a time. There are only losers in such a scenario. But who wins politically in the battle for supremacy between skier traffic and the state’s trucking industry?
The Colorado Independent on Friday reported that gubernatorial candidate John Hickenlooper had floated the idea of restricting large truck traffic on I-70 west of Denver during peak hours as a way of alleviating congestion on holiday weekends or on busy ski weekends. The story also quoted a Colorado Department of Transportation spokesman saying that the federal government would not allow such a restriction.
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.
In the current dismal economic climate there are no big-picture transportation-funding fixes for Colorado’s crumbling system of roads and bridges, no high-speed transit solution...