The Colorado Department of Transportation will recommend a two-lane widening of Interstate 270 as the showpiece of its long-planned rebuild of the critical connector from north Denver through Adams County, prompting a bitter backlash from neighborhood and environmental groups demanding that the agency begin fulfilling mandates to cut pollution and promote transit.
Freight trucks from burgeoning warehouse shippers and small business haulers make up nearly 1 in 5 of the 100,000 daily vehicle trips on I-270 during some hours. Cars and trucks bogged down in two lanes self-detour onto I-25, Interstate 70 and local streets, adding miles and emissions to routine trips. Lanes and bridges from the two-lane highway regularly crumble in pieces onto the streets below.
The first section from I-70 to Vasquez Boulevard opened 57 years ago, and nearly everyone agrees an I-270 remake is long past due. It’s been on CDOT’s list of top 10 crucial projects for years.
But at $725 million, I-270 will also be the largest metro-area interstate overhaul since CDOT met a legislative mandate in late 2021 to pass rules requiring a mission change for the highway builder: No longer would knocking down houses to pave new lanes be the solution to all traffic problems.
Yet the Draft Environmental Impact Statement for I-270 that CDOT will issue by the end of November will highlight the “preferred alternative” as adding one new toll and transit express lane in each direction of the highway that connects I-70 to I-76 and northbound I-25 on a diagonal through Commerce City.
“An awful lot of people from many, many communities and many parts of the economy use this road,” CDOT chief Shoshana Lew said in an interview. “So having that asset be one that carries people safely, smoothly and efficiently is really important to the movement of the economy. It’s not just about the multimodal elements, but rather about the need to repair and modernize 270 itself. And one of the reasons that this project has been in the 10-year plan since the beginning is because we’ve always felt that it was so important because of the shape that it’s in.”
Widening I-270 is not a betrayal of the 2021 mission change, Lew said.
Commanding CDOT to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions “was never intended to make it impossible to do highway capacity projects,” Lew said. Through years of I-270 planning, freight interests wanted new unrestricted driving lanes, environmental groups wanted bus or bicycle-only lanes. Adding two express lanes means, Lew said, that “the old adage about a compromise making nobody happy applies in this case.”
Opponents of highway widening — a coalition of clean energy groups and advocates for highly polluted ZIP codes inside the I-270/70/25 triangle — counter that any new lanes will simply fill with extra traffic. The design will neither reduce emissions nor ease travel for local residents, workers or small business owners, according to the objections.
“We should acknowledge that we’ve prioritized cars over transit for decades,” said Matt Frommer, a transportation analyst with the nonprofit Southwestern Energy Efficiency Project. “We have less bus service today than we had in 2003, and the region’s grown by a third. And at the same time, how many highways have we widened?”
Advocates for more mass transit, and far greater accommodations for pedestrians and bicyclers, note studies showing central I-25’s additional lanes filling up quickly and slowing down within a few years of the notorious T-Rex widening.
Environmental groups feel they’re not getting their due
Planners, meanwhile, seem to be paying little attention to the environmental justice movement that helped pass legislation and air quality rules seeking to ease the burden on communities disproportionately impacted by historic highway and industrial pollution, said Ean Tafoya, Colorado director of GreenLatinos.
“Who, of any of those people in those appointed positions or elected positions, could look us straight in the face and say that air quality and public health hasn’t been a huge priority, has been elevated across this region for the last 10 years,” Tafoya said.
CDOT says it made some key concessions to potential opponents of the I-270 plans early on, by volunteering to expand their deliberations from a federal “environmental assessment” to a more detailed “environmental impact statement,” acknowledging up front there would be deep regional implications. That draft environmental impact statement, or EIS, will be published in the Federal Register by the end of the month, CDOT says.
The agency will at the same time deliver an analysis of the anticipated greenhouse gas emissions and particulate pollution from the preferred alternative of a new express/transit lane in each direction, an alternative of one new general purpose lane in each direction, and the “no action” alternative. That emissions analysis is part of the 2021 legislation and rules that raised new transportation fees and redirected CDOT’s mission.
Opponents of the highway widening have asked a volunteer group of transportation and urban design planners to propose transit and multimodal alternatives to CDOT’s preferred plan. They also asked CDOT to delay publishing the draft EIS until that alternative study was done and could be included.
“We understand that they’re very close to finalizing that report, and it includes an alternative that this expert team believes would meet CDOT’s ‘purpose and need statement’ but wouldn’t add a lane to the corridor,” said Alexandra Schluntz, senior attorney with Earthjustice.
CDOT declined to wait, saying the alternatives could be included in all the public comments the agency is required to collect and respond to as part of highway planning. Officials earlier this month offered to extend the 45-day public comment period an extra 15 days past the holiday season to accommodate more voices, Lew said.
CDOT has responded better to community opposition in the past, Schluntz said, notably when it dropped the idea of adding another lane to I-25 through downtown Denver in 2022. The agency keeps mentioning that its I-270 planning has involved hundreds of community meetings, listening sessions and “stakeholder” sessions, Schluntz said, but expanding I-270 has seemed a foregone conclusion for years.
“All of that work has led to just the same place over and over again,” Schluntz said. “Or to put it another way, the funding plans have always called for an expansion of the highway, and so they spent a lot of time talking about different alternatives, but really, I think, always with an eye towards they just want to add a lane in each direction on the freeway.”
The heart of the state’s preferred alternative for the 7 miles of I-270 is a new express or “managed” lane in each direction, on top of the two existing general purpose lanes in each direction. CDOT points to the success and public acceptance of a similar arrangement on U.S. 36 to Boulder, and believes matching I-270 to that format would create smoother transportation for all from Denver International Airport through Boulder County.
The managed lanes would likely be a combination of demand-sensitive tolls, HOV and express buses. Lew repeatedly points to the former success of RTD’s Flatiron Flyer, with fast, comfortable buses on high-demand routes, as a future model for the highway.
Expanded and managed lanes, rebuilding of eight crumbling bridges and a general repaving will combine to get drivers back on the “hypotenuse” of the interstate triangle rather than diverting themselves to I-25, I-70 or a series of neighborhood streets, Lew said.
“So essentially, what you’re doing by fixing this road that has been in bad shape for a long time is putting that traffic back on the most efficient distance between the two points, rather than having this kind of hodgepodge of detours,” she said.
Pollution reduction by toll lanes “better than no action”
The greenhouse gas reporting to be delivered alongside the draft EIS will show the preferred managed-lane alternative will reduce vehicle miles traveled in and around the interstate triangle by 6%, said CDOT’s lead I-270 planner David Merenich.
“We’re going to be taking 6% of that traffic and bringing it back to where it was originally intended, which is onto I-270, and that results in a greenhouse gas reduction regionally,” Merenich said.
The pollution modeling will also show the additional managed lanes reducing particulate matter at both the 2.5 and 10 micrometer federal standards, Merenich said. “It’s better than no action, and it’s much better than three general purpose lanes” in each direction, he added.
The hundreds of community meetings, showcases and workshops have helped guide CDOT to accommodate the kinds of multimodal alternative transport advocates are pushing for, Merenich added. Current bridges and crossings of I-270 are dangerously inaccessible to pedestrians or cyclists, and cut off the neighborhoods from parks, Sand Creek and regional trail systems.
“The Vasquez interchange is a major barrier. Working with community to understand what that future interchange should look like has been one of the things I’m most proud of, especially that we’re going to be creating grade- separated crossings at Vasquez, where people aren’t going to have to wait at lights or worry about traffic, and they can get directly on to the Sand Creek Greenway,” Merenich said. “I feel like we’ve been very transparent, and people are ready to see the work that we’ve been doing.”
Advocacy groups wanted CDOT to hold back its preferred alternatives until the independent experts could deliver their far more creative and sustainable plans, Earthjustice’s Schluntz said. CDOT multimodal plans for the corridor have touted a pedestrian bridge over 270, and Commerce City will study access across railroad tracks near the sprawling Suncor refinery.
“You know, there are better solutions, like land bridges, compared to overpasses where you have to climb up two sets of stairs and then over a busy and polluted freeway and down the other side, to what? It’s just kind of a very pathetic Band-Aid,” Schluntz said.
CDOT’s nods to public transit like RTD won’t mean much if they don’t help find the major funding needed to run more express buses and make easier connections for the “last mile” of commutes, Frommer said.
“Adams County just finished a transportation master plan. It’s got a lot of good stuff in it. They’re saying we’ve got to give people other transportation options. Not everybody drives, and safety is a concern,” he said. Some of those projects are included in the pipelines of the regional transportation plan, Frommer said, but “they’re slated for the 2040s if we ever get funding for them. We could choose to fund those now, instead of I-270 highway lanes.”
Local officials whose constituents include some of the highly impacted neighborhoods are open to hearing CDOT’s preferred alternative. Adams County Commissioner Julie Duran Mullica said she thinks CDOT has been sincere and widespread in its community involvement effort for I-270’s future.
It wasn’t just environmental advocates who showed up at public hearings, Duran Mullica said. The forums heard from a lot of small business owners in the trucking industry, who are daily among those stuck in gridlock or being forced to blast through side streets to stay on time. A highway widening makes sense to them, and is long overdue, she said.
“Commerce City is called Commerce City for a reason,” Duran Mullica said. “I do want to make sure that people understand. These are people who are family businesses. A lot of them are immigrants. They live in that area. They’ve been there for generations, some families. So I get uncomfortable with the whole, ‘Well, you need to listen to community.’ Industry is community, in that part of the county.”