In the News...

Lawmakers Hope 'Zipper Lanes' will Finally Ease I-70 Traffic

Wednesday, June 2 2010

KDVR FOX 31
By: Eli Stokols
May 28th, 2010

BRECKENRIDGE, Colo. - Gov. Bill Ritter signed five bills in Summit County Thursday afternoon including one that could finally solve a decades-old problem: ski weekend traffic congestion on Interstate 70 between Denver and the high country.

With Senate Bill 184, now signed into law, C-DOT will continue to study the feasibility of installing zipper lanes on a 15-mile stretch of I-70 between Floyd Hill and Georgetown. Zipper lanes, already in use in other large cities including Dallas and New York, allow states to change the flow of traffic in an inside lane so that three lanes of traffic travel in the busiest direction at peak times, with one lane left moving in the opposite direction.

"My hope is this is the last Memorial Day that people will have to suffer in that I-70 traffic jam going home," said Sen. Chris Romer, the Denver Democrat who co-sponsored the bill with Summit County Democrats Sen. Dan Gibbs and Rep. Christine Scanlan. "People really want to spend time in these gorgeous mountains. Our job is to get them up and down the mountain quicker and safer."

CDOT, still studying the idea of zipper lanes on I-70, already knows that they would make the commute significantly shorter; although zipper lanes have never been used on a stretch as long and mountainous as this one.

"You will decrease your travel time by 40 percent," said CDOT spokeswoman Stacey Stegman. "What we don't know is what that will do to the other direction: if you're reducing down to one lane, how bad is that going to make it for them? And that's what we're trying to measure. How are emergency services vehicles going to get there? Where are we going to store snow?"

If those questions can be answered to C-DOT's satisfaction, zipper lanes could be installed over a six month period that would likely begin this winter.

"We really believe that the zipper lane is at least a possibility for a short-term remedy to the I-70 congestion," Ritter said.

Other measures signed by Ritter Thursday in Breckenridge allow Colorado Mountain College to offer four-year degrees, encourage Colorado children to actively enjoy the outdoors, to increase the minimum speed on I-70, another effort to improve traffic flow, and to help fire investigators streamline the process of arson investigations by allowing fire chiefs to access the CBI directly.