For whom the road tolls

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Send not to know; For whom the road tolls; It tolls for thee. 

Up in Minor Local Politician Valhalla, Woody Hewett must be laughing his ass off this week. More about that in a moment.

The tolls returned to U.S. 36 this week, so it’s time for a trip down memory lane in a single occupancy vehicle. If you stop to think about it, taking the Turnpike from Boulder to Denver and back is arguably the single most-shared experience of Boulder residents.

Everyone in Boulder with access to a car, truck or bus has probably done it, and most have done it dozens of times. For many residents, the view from the top of Davidson Mesa was their first view of Boulder. It’s a picture in virtually everyone’s mental photo album. So where did that road come from that old-timers like me persist in referring to as the “Boulder-Denver Turnpike” instead of the far more colorful and evocative “U.S. 36”?

The Boulder-Denver Turnpike was invented at the University of Colorado.

The inventor was CU civil engineering Professor Roderick Downing. He first proposed a direct Boulder- Denver highway connection in 1927, a year after he joined the faculty. For years Downing sent his students out to survey potential routes for the highway and relentlessly lobbied the state government to build it. It was an idea he wouldn’t let go of until its time finally came.

And its time finally came after World War II, when then Governor Ralph Carr took up the cause. It was Carr’s idea to build the highway as a toll road — aka a turnpike — a radical thought at the time.

After considerable controversy, the toll-road idea was finally accepted (grudgingly) by Boulder — it was that way or no highway — and the road was financed with bonds to be paid back with receipts from a 25-cent toll (15 cents if you got off at Broomfield) over the next 30 years.

Cost of the 18-mile, four-line divided concrete highway was the princely sum of $6.3 million ($55.4 million in 2014 dollars).

When the road opened on January 17, 1952, its supporters were sweating bullets over whether enough people would use it — 3,000 to 4,000 a day — to service the bonds.

Heh. 

By the time the bonds were paid off in 1967 — 15 years early — the Turnpike was handling 13,750 trips a day. Today it handles more than 120,000 trips.

There’s no mystery as to why traffic volumes on the Turnpike exploded. The road opened up tens of thousands of acres between Denver and Boulder to development. By 2014, the cities in the Boulder Turnpike corridor had grown to five to 10 times the size they were in 1952. (Boulder went from about 20,000 to 100,000, while Louisville and Lafayette went from about 2,000 to 20,000. Superior grew from 134 to 13,000.)

As the population in the highway corridor grew, additional on and offramps were added to the road. When the Turnpike opened, you could get on and off at Federal Boulevard in Denver, at U.S. 287 in Broomfield and at 28th Street in Boulder (then called the 28th Street By-Pass). Today it can be accessed from about 10 locations.

The toll always grated on Boulderites. They accepted it in no small part because the road’s advocates swore in blood on a stack of Bibles that the day the bonds were paid off the toll booths would come down.

So when it was announced in 1966 that the bonds would be paid off in 1967, 15 years ahead of schedule, all Boulder was counting down the days as the last quarters dropped into the till.

Back to Woody Hewett. In 1966 he was Boulder’s State Senator. Woody had the prescience to see that use of the Turnpike was going to keep growing — so he proposed leaving on the toll and using the revenue to six-lane the highway.

The idea was met with, uh, skepticism. Months later, after Woody scraped the last of the tar off, he concluded that running for re-election was an idea whose time had passed.

But this week Woody is getting the last laugh. That’s because this is the week tolls are being returned to the Turnpike to cover the $500 million cost of adding the so-called “Express Lanes” (one in each direction) to the Turnpike.

The new tolls, which will apply only to the express lanes, will range from $1.25 to $6.70, depending on the time of day and whether the driver has set up a pre-paid account. The $1.25 toll, which is good during light travel times and weekends, is actually a bargain compared to the original 25-cent toll. Converted into 1952 dollars, it works out to 14 cents.

Ah, but the new road will never match the quality of the driving experience on the old one. My fondest Boulder Turnpike memory is of coming home from Denver one night at Zero Dark Thirty — it must have been in 1963 or 1964 — and driving the length of the road floored out at 95 miles an hour. I counted a total of six other cars on the road traveling in both directions.

Smoke that in your so-called Express Lane.

And about the view from Davidson Mesa: It almost didn’t happen. The committee that determined the Turnpike’s final route gave considerable thought to going around the mesa to the north instead of over it. The northern route was considered a bit safer, but longer and without the view. In the end the committee decided the view was worth the risk. Amen.

This opinion column does not necessarily reflect the views of Boulder Weekly.