CDOT's plan for toll roads hits resistance

Legislator opposes deals that would hamper free highways

Kevin Flynn, Rocky Mountain News

Published January 18, 2006 at midnight

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A Golden legislator who opposes plans for a toll road through that city wants to prohibit the state from hampering traffic on free roads in order to divert traffic onto toll roads.

The Colorado Department of Transportation opposes the bill, proposed by Rep. Gwyn Green, because these so-called non-compete agreements could be essential to selling bonds for future toll roads.

Green's bill, H.B. 1116, would make it illegal for CDOT's tolling enterprise or other entities that build toll roads to make agreements with cities and counties that have the effect of inhibiting traffic on nearby free roads.

"Intentionally clogging up free roads paid for with tax dollars in order to force drivers to pay again for toll roads is outrageous," said Green, a Democrat. "Toll roads should sink or swim on their own."

CDOT is studying whether to build the missing segment of the metro beltway as a toll road. It would go through Golden on Colorado 93 and U.S. 6, and is hotly opposed by many in that city.

CDOT chief Tom Norton said the bill would undermine the state's plans to use tolling as a way of making up for funding shortfalls.

"The bottom line is that it would make the bonds very difficult to market," Norton said. "In some cases, where free roads are designed to take people to and from the same points as a toll road, they would use the free road to avoid the toll."

CDOT plans to introduce its first toll facility sometime this year on the high-occupancy vehicle lanes of Interstate 25 from downtown to the Boulder Turnpike. It is also planning express toll lanes in the center of C-470 between Wadsworth Boulevard and I-25.

Critics of toll roads say putting such facilities in an area will lead to lack of improvements on free roads because that could cause the toll roads to lose customers.

Worse, some non-compete agreements not only ban free-road improvements, but actually call for measures that diminish the current capacity of potentially competing free roads.

Such was the case with an agreement the E-470 Authority signed with Commerce City in 1995. Under it, the city agreed that when the northern segment of the E-470 toll road between 120th Avenue and Denver International Airport opened in 2003, the city would lower the speed limit on parallel Tower Road from 55 to 40 and install at least three traffic signals at intersections whether they were needed or not.

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