This is the first part of Bikes, Buses, and Automobiles, a three-part series about commuting, congestion, and transportation in the Roaring Fork Valley.
If you’ve ever made small talk with someone here in the Roaring Fork Valley, chances are, you’ve brought up traffic.
An accident on highway 82, A fire on I-70, and the twice daily crush of rush hour in and out of town. It’s a regular part of all of our lives, especially as so many people travel regionally to work, to run daily errands, and to get to the mountains.
Arnie Bay is a facilities technician for Pitkin County. He’s lived in the valley since 1973, and when he sat down for an interview, he was pretty chipper for someone who’d been up since before sunrise.
“We leave from Silt at 4:40 in the morning because we work four 10-hour days,” he explained. “So we get to work here at 6:00 and then we leave at 4:00. If everything goes well, it's about an hour and 15 minutes.”
He lives in Silt, and carpools four days a week to Aspen, riding to work with a group of about four to seven other county employees, who all live in different towns downvalley of Aspen.
Bay’s story is a common one in this area. He’s one of thousands of workers downvalley that commute long hours to their jobs.
As State Representative Elizabeth Velasco (D-Glenwood Springs) puts it, our region is a very mobile community.
“We travel for work, recreation, and even for services,” she observed. “You know, I feel like many of our community members might have their childcare in a county, their job in a different county, their home in a different county.”
The region’s resort economy makes it so that lots of people can’t afford to live where they work, pushing people to areas outside of Aspen, and increasingly, Glenwood Springs. A lot of these workers get to where they’re going by car. As more and more people move to the valley, there are more and more cars on the road — at least it seems to Bay.
“And in the last 20 years, every year has gotten heavier and heavier,” he said. “Used to be you didn't see anybody first thing in the morning, and now it's quite a bit of traffic coming in at that time of morning. And now we're going home at 4:00. We're right in the middle of all the traffic.”
He observed that traffic seems to have gotten notably heavier further downvalley.
“You notice going through Glenwood and up to I-70, at times during the middle of the day, there's traffic,” he said. “On days off, I come in to go into Glenwood to do some personal business…and I'm amazed how much traffic is still running.”
Bay’s impression as a regular commuter aligns with recent data.
According to the city of Glenwood’s comprehensive plan, between 2010 and 2021, traffic on Highway 82 in South Glenwood grew by 23%.
But upvalley traffic levels have remained fairly steady in Aspen, since the introduction of the bus rapid transit system (BRT).
That’s according to Pete Rice, the parking and transportation director for the city of Aspen. He said the city tries to focus on residents, so someone who lives in, for example, the West End isn’t driving to the Core for errands.
“We want to provide them easy (access) so that they're not part of this congestion issue. So Car-to-Go, Downtowner, or WeCycle. All these things were done with the traffic demand management.”
He said the information they have indicates that if you give people options to get out of their cars and get around in other ways, they will use them.
Glenwood Springs, Carbondale, and Basalt are all learning from Aspen, and starting to incorporate some of those transportation demand management strategies, like bikesharing and on-demand microtransit, into their own policies.
The biggest component of creating consistent valley-wide transit is the Roaring Fork Transportation Authority (RFTA). According to the American Public Transit Association, RFTA is the second largest transportation authority in the state of Colorado by ridership, second only to RTD in Denver.
That’s not just important for the quality of life of commuters, but also for the climate. Transportation, mostly single-occupant cars, is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in Colorado.
“We provided an overall net positive emissions, with negative 23,017 metric tons of emissions displaced,” said Jamie Tatsuno, RFTA’s communications manager.
She said RFTA’s goal is to triple the number of emissionsdisplaced by 2030. But, she pointed out, people choose to take RFTA for reasons other than environmental impacts.
“Fuel savings from not driving your car, reduced congestion on the roads, jobs accessible by transit, public benefits saved due to employment and reduced parking,” she listed as examples.
Arnie Bay said there’s definitely upsides to not having to be behind the wheel every day, whether you’re on public transit like the bus, or carpooling with buddies.
“You sneak a quick nap in, sometimes,” he said. “But you just get to know each other, talking about what our interests are. You know, some guys (like) fishing or hunting or different sports, things like that.”
Over the course of this series, you’ll hear more about the other ways folks like Bay are trying to get cars off the road, give people options for getting around, and how our community’s transportation policies can make that easier.
Copyright 2024 Aspen Public Radio