Interstate 70 is the only major east-to-west highway in Colorado. That’s apparent for anyone who’s ever driven its steep and curving mountain passes.
Sometimes “driven” is a generous term. Motorists often find themselves inching forward for hours in a seemingly endless ribbon of bumper-to-bumper traffic that extends to the horizon like so many snails on parade.
“You travel at specific times, it's going to be busy, and so you got to figure out how to work that,” said Austyn Dineen, the I-70 mountain corridor communications manager for the Colorado Department of Transportation.
That’s where CDOT hopes its new I-70 mountain corridor landing page will be useful. Launched earlier this month, the page links directly to a map of road conditions and traffic delays from Golden to Glenwood Springs. Another link leads to 120 live camera feeds from Golden to Vail. Drivers can use those real-time conditions to decide when to start their journey.
Additional resources on the page help for planning ahead, both logistically and legally.
“The mountain corridor is not a typical road. It's not a typical interstate,” Dineen said. “It has dangerous mountain terrain. It has extreme conditions at times.”
As such, the mountain corridor has atypical requirements for drivers in the winter. When conditions warrant, CDOT requires vehicles to be all-wheel-drive or four-wheel drive with approved tires. For vehicles that don’t meet those standards, tire chains are required.
Those regulations, as well as winter preparedness checklists and avalanche safety information, have long been on CDOT’s website. But the new landing page marks the first time all these resources have been compiled into one site that residents can bookmark for ready access.
An average of 30,000 vehicles go through the Eisenhower tunnel per day, which Dineen said can be a “cultural experience” for the uninitiated. It’s worthwhile to plan ahead.
“We want to make sure that that information is readily available so that people can go get after what they want to get after,” she said. “Go skiing. Go hiking. Enjoy the great Rocky Mountains, which makes Colorado great.”
