Across the Mountain West, Communities Race to Outdo Each Other with Bad Ideas

Blame truckers, kill housing, stop lift construction for arbitrary reasons – we’ve hit Peak Dumb

Filing under “U.S. America”

One of the great joys of cross-country interstate driving is watching 18-wheelers at work. They are the best drivers on the road. They understand how the lanes work. They maintain a constant speed. They always signal lane changes. They speak to one another in a sort of Morse code of flashing head and tail lights. When a trucker signals for a lane change I always flash my headlights to signal they can go even if I have to slow down. No one moves an 80,000-pound vehicle unless they have to. Typically they’ll thank me with a flip of their tail-lamps. I take this as a signal of gratitude and respect. Each driver’s signal is unique, an anthropomorphization of their rig, driver merged with machine.  

This great orchestration unrolls amidst the absolute chaos of The Rest of Us. Driving up and down I-70 from Copper Mountain to Denver airport in a January snowstorm, I kept near the posted speed limit in the right lane. All around me, a cavalcade of gigantic SUVs barreled down the mountain as fast as possible, which usually meant as fast as the vehicle they were tailgating was traveling.

American drivers are terrible. Nearly 43,000 people died on American roads in 2021. That is insane and, for an advanced nation, unacceptable. Multiple sources rank our country as having the second- or third-least-safe roads in the world. We rank 11^th in road deaths per 100,000 people, between Kazakhstan and Georgia (the country), and 51^st out of 53 countries on Zutobi’s list of most-dangerous nations to drive. Most sources cite speeding and rampant alcohol use as common contributing factors, though surely many people meet a lamp post at 80 miles per hour while checking their Giggles on StreamTube. Large trucks play a smaller part in this paved massacre than one may suppose, with a 27 percent lower crash rate per miles-driven than other vehicles. Car drivers are at fault in approximately three-quarters of fatal car-truck crashes.

And yet, the Colorado legislature is scapegoating truckers in a dimwitted attempt to unclog their precious I-70. Per Summit Daily News:

A proposal to restrict big-rig truckers from using the left lane in certain high-risk areas of Interstate 70 through Colorado’s mountains moved closer to becoming law Tuesday after the state House gave near-unanimous support of the idea.

Senate Bill 100, brought by Western Slope lawmakers, would also expand where truckers are required to carry chains during winter months.

After sponsors amended the bill, it now also requires the Colorado Department of Transportation to look into whether the state should temporarily close roadways to truckers during snowstorms. That would be part of a study into the economic and safety impacts of commercial vehicle incidents during inclement weather.

After its introduction, the sponsors changed the measure in several other key aspects, with the lane limitations and chain requirements being somewhat narrowed along the way.

The legislation is aimed at preventing crashes and road closures, which can hurt commerce in the state and in communities along the corridor. …

Under the bill, truckers wouldn’t be able to use the far-left lane to pass other vehicles in these sections of I-70:

-       Glenwood Canyon

-       Dowd Junction

-       Vail Pass

-       Eisenhower Tunnel

-       Georgetown Hill

-       Floyd Hill

The senate also passed the bipartisan bill. Which should do about as much good as gluing snow back to the mountain following an avalanche.

This is Peak U.S. America: identify an intractable problem (I-70 is broken), ignore the most obvious reasons (volume, speeding, tailgating, distracted drivers), blame something else (highly trained professional truck drivers), and focus enormous energy and attention on restricting that scapegoat.

In Utah, pro-car advocates spin themselves in circles to explain how a gondola that would travel over SR-210 through Little Cottonwood Canyon would fail to eliminate the snarled car traffic that clots the highway now. Alta’s general manager thinks we can fix the whole thing with traffic lights. The town of Alta has “concerns” about the environmental impact of an aerial lift and its 22 towers spread over eight miles. Morons on social media rant endlessly about enforcing traction laws. No one says the obvious: SR-210 is itself an environmental catastrophe that never should have been built. The goal should not be to determine how we can move thousands of cars safely up and down this bullrun each winter day, but on how we can close it forever.

Meanwhile, in Steamboat, where the average single-family home costs $1.8 million, voters rejected a plan to build affordable housing for more than 6,000 residents on a 534-acre ranch west of town. While this is exactly the sort of dense, planned development that ski towns desperately need, a group of local citizens crusaded against it to defend the town’s “character.” Which we can translate as a euphemism for satisfaction with the status quo: a blight of oversized mansions climbing the hills between town and the ski area, and an underclass of servant-workers living in their hatchbacks or driving 75 miles each way to work.

And in Park City, a town surrounded by and dependent upon ski lifts for its very existence, Very Concerned Citizens continue to oppose every detail of Deer Valley’s redevelopment, with HOAs suing over lost parking lots and wildlife advocates certain that the proposed Park Peak six-pack would destroy habitat that is apparently stuffed with moose, elk, and mule deer who will just absolutely fall down dead the moment the first tree is cut (or they’ll just, like, walk over to the next mountain).

The mountain-town West is at a historical inflection point. Short-term rentals have gutted housing stock, enriching a few at the expense of the many. There is little vision to move people into and around communities by any conveyance other than personal vehicles. Megapasses are pushing ever-more skiers onto an unchanging number of destination resorts. The solution to this mess is not the same in every municipality, but the basic ingredients should be: more and dense housing, fewer cars, as much regional and local mass transit as possible.

Instead, the fine citizens of Vail spent $17.5 million last year to ensure the local bighorn sheep had 23 acres to poop on. Vail Resorts had intended to build housing for 165 employees on a small portion of that land. Where will those people live now? The sheep should have a great view of their taillights as they roll out of town down I-70 to their distant bedroom.