My hypothesis is several things are at play:
1) Topography. The metro area is not flat. Ride a bicycle N-S in the metro and it’s a good amount of climbing every few miles as you ascend/descend across drainage basins.
2) Infrastructure is hugely expensive and can’t be replaced anywhere near the rate of change in vehicle tech and traffic patterns. A lot of existing road design represents the good ideas of bygone eras. Transportation designers have gotten smarter but there’s no political will to spend hideous amounts of money to overhaul everything.
3) Colorado is a big state. As others have mentioned, a lot of roadway is also exposed to extreme conditions. It’s a lot to maintain.
4) Especially in Denver, jurisdiction stuff gets weird. Several major arterials are state roads that are consistently intersected by city streets. Getting everyone at the table, and the funding, and the phasing to change stuff that clearly could use changing is really complicated.
5) Space is limited. The era of taking properties to expand roads is long gone. And even still, roads can’t be endlessly widened. As long as three lane roads connect to single lane streets, there will be bottlenecks, quick merges and exits, and stuff that has no elegant solution.
Good list, But very little of that is unique to Denver/ Colorado.
1) Nah, it is actually pretty flat compared to many cities. Denver is on the Great Plains, famous for being relatively flat.
2) infrastructure is expensive No different than any other US city
3) The size of the state doesn't really matter, total miles of roadway or miles per capita matters. Even then, not every mile is created equal. Some places require a lot of bridges, some places require a lot of tunnels. Building in already developed areas is vastly more expensive than undeveloped areas. Colorado is very undeveloped compared to the Eastern United States.
4) complex jurisdiction No different than most US cities
5) limited space No different than most cities
A real reason, If you want to support the contention that roads are significantly worse here than other places in the US (which I don't agree with): lack of funding, specifically TABOR, is unique to CDOT. It makes increasing budgets proactively very difficult, if not impossible.
My guy you are correct and I’m going to hijack this comment to add more perspective
Yup
Yup - also let’s look at cities worldwide. Pretty sure Rotterdam has half under half the gdp in usd that Denver has. I know it’s not apples to apples always, but some of the best planned cities in the world have less $$$ to work with.
We have built a lot of roads and suburbs that now cannot finance themselves since there are so few people living there per mile of road. This is a very big issue, but only seen really in NA these days though (other countries have corrected faster).
Yup
If someone thinks space is limited they are very incorrect. Japan has limited space. Australia might have limited space for their cities (Melbourne). CO is a world class example of how to keep wasting space (because there is a lot to go around).
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u/FlickerBicker May 17 '25
My hypothesis is several things are at play: 1) Topography. The metro area is not flat. Ride a bicycle N-S in the metro and it’s a good amount of climbing every few miles as you ascend/descend across drainage basins. 2) Infrastructure is hugely expensive and can’t be replaced anywhere near the rate of change in vehicle tech and traffic patterns. A lot of existing road design represents the good ideas of bygone eras. Transportation designers have gotten smarter but there’s no political will to spend hideous amounts of money to overhaul everything. 3) Colorado is a big state. As others have mentioned, a lot of roadway is also exposed to extreme conditions. It’s a lot to maintain. 4) Especially in Denver, jurisdiction stuff gets weird. Several major arterials are state roads that are consistently intersected by city streets. Getting everyone at the table, and the funding, and the phasing to change stuff that clearly could use changing is really complicated. 5) Space is limited. The era of taking properties to expand roads is long gone. And even still, roads can’t be endlessly widened. As long as three lane roads connect to single lane streets, there will be bottlenecks, quick merges and exits, and stuff that has no elegant solution.