Durango’s “rush hour” isn’t much by big city standards, but given the expected population boom, this relatively remote pocket of Southwest Colorado could be in for a rude awakening.
“We’re pretty lucky here,” said Tony Cady, planning and environmental manager for the Colorado Department of Transportation. “But with the growth in rural areas of Colorado, we’re looking at having our traffic double in the next 20 years.
“And it may be even worse for areas like Durango,” he said.
“Rush hour” in Durango, as it stands, is a relatively short-lived traffic jam for anywhere between 15 to 20 minutes at peak hours in the morning around 7 to 8 a.m., when people are going to work or dropping their kids off at school.
Traffic tends to pick up again around 3 p.m. when school lets out, and around 5 p.m. as people start to make the trek home from work, said Amber Blake, assistant city manager for Durango.
As a result, the hotbed areas tend to be the intersections of Highway 550/160, 32nd Street and Main Avenue, 15th Street and Main Avenue, and the arterial roads out of town, such as the U.S. highways and Florida Road (County Road 240).
A few others not to be left off the list: the roundabout near Chapman Hill, East Third Avenue where it dead ends into Florida Road and nearly the entire stretch of Camino del Rio.
The intersection of Highway 550/160 near the DoubleTree Hotel, for instance, receives nearly 40,000 vehicles a day, CDOT said. Cady said studies have shown that intersection is the busiest on the Western Slope.
Jim Davis, road and bridge director for La Plata County, said Florida Road, which heads northeast out of town, has a capacity for 5,000 average daily trips. The last study showed there were approximately 10,000 daily trips.
In the short term, Blake said the city has encouraged people to find alternate modes of transportation, such as biking and walking to work, or even just leaving a few minutes earlier or later to avoid peak times.
The city also wants to increase ridership on its transit system, though the service has experienced financial difficulty in recent years. This May, the city will be forced to eliminate two routes on the west side of town.
While it may be a sort of luxury to complain about traffic, it’s when planners look to the future that real worries and concerns about infrastructure come into play.
La Plata County’s population, which now hovers around 55,000, is expected to increase to 64,300 by 2025 and to 95,000 by 2050.
“Growth is a really big issue right now,” Cady said. “We know we’re going to grow, and we know we need to improve our infrastructure, but we have no money to do it.”
Agencies responsible for planning roads and growth, such as the city of Durango, La Plata County and CDOT, must plan to alleviate issues associated with population increase.
The problem across the board is finding dollars to take plans from paper to reality.
For instance, CDOT knows it must eventually redo Highway 550/160 at the DoubleTree, which is expected to double its average daily trips to 80,000 vehicles a day over the next 20 years, Cady said.
And, CDOT hopes to expand Highway 160 from Durango to Bayfield as well as Highway 550 from Durango to the New Mexico line – both heavily trafficked routes for commuters – to four-lane highways.
“We don’t have the money to undertake those projects, so we have to slowly chip away at it,” Cady said.
Improvements to the area’s road system do happen, as evidenced by the new interchange at Farmington Hill, which is quickly losing its local moniker, “The Bridge to Nowhere,” as the project nears completion.
That project, for example, was implemented to serve predicted growth in Three Springs and Durango by providing a safer, better option for traveling south of Durango instead of the steep, two-lane Farmington Hill.
The county runs into financial constraints, Davis said, as a result of a recent decline in revenues and two failed attempts in 2015 and 2016 to increase the mill levy to pay for road and bridge projects.
“We do not have the ability to prepare for the anticipated impact of growth or to address existing road deficiencies,” Davis said.
Cady said two efforts are underway that could dedicate some funding for transportation.
One is a bill in the Colorado General Assembly that would pull $500 million from the state’s general fund that would go toward transportation improvement projects.
Cady said the Southwest Region typically gets between 8 and 12 percent of statewide funding, so this bill could funnel up to $60 million to the area.
The other effort is from the Denver Metro Mayors Association, which is seeking a ballot initiative to increase the state’s sales tax. While a specific number hasn’t been pinned down, even a half-cent increase would generate $4 billion for transportation.
Cady said that would make up for almost half of the department’s $9 billion shortfall. For Southwest Colorado, those added funds would likely help pay for expanding highways 550 and 160 in select spots to four lanes.
But even when planners solve regional traffic issues, the natural layout of Durango with its hilly terrain and the Animas River running through it, presents logistical challenges.
“When you look at the transportation network we have within the city, we don’t have a standard grid,” Blake said. “There’s nothing we can do to overcome environmental constraints because you can’t just put in another road.”
Whereas other communities have several roads to get from point A to point B, many places in Durango can be reached by only one route, Cady said.
“There’s really only so much you can do with our existing infrastructure,” he said.
Blake said there’s really no solution to the city’s expected traffic woes, but rather, a smorgasbord of strategies will be needed to tame the problem.
Encouraging other ways of traveling such as biking and walking, as well as promoting more transit options, are key, Blake said. Other suggestions are flexible work hours and telecommuting.
But more than anything, planners must not look at transportation in isolation. Instead, Blake said, the bigger picture needs to be taken into account when envisioning growth.
Encouraging more housing within the city rather than outside city limits, for instance, also has the effect of making walking and biking to work easier, thereby taking cars off the road.
“How can we fit these pieces of the puzzle together to see the picture of the community we all want to live, work and play in?” Blake said.
But for now, maybe the best solution to Durango’s modest traffic problem is just taking a deep breath.
“It’s all a matter of perspective, too, right?” Cady said. “I drive through town and complain how bad traffic is, but then I go to Denver, and when I come back, I don’t complain for three weeks. It’s a drop in the bucket.”
jromeo@durangoherald.com
