What a bunch of crap! I guess they start at 11am on Sundays. What the hell for? It shouldn't take 3 hours to get home from Copper Mt. When you leave at 1pm.

Theory is that it normalizes the speed and keeps everyone moving faster than if people were speeding up and slowing down repeatedly. Some engineer ran the numbers and said that they can move more traffic through, more quickly by doing it...

How'd it work in the real world?

Took us 3.5 hours to get home. Usually when we leave that early, 1pm, we are home in about 1.5 hours. It was stop and go from just east of Silverthorne all the way past Idaho Springs and finally opened up at the bottom of Floyd hill.

Sounds like how it normally is (with heavy traffic and all).

I heard something about the winter x games adding to the already overloaded traffic...

Crazy5 wrote:I heard something about the winter x games adding to the already overloaded traffic...

That's very possible. Just didn't make sense that it was flowing along fine till the pacing start point, where you start up to the tunnel east out of Silverthorne.

True. That was in Aspen, so it would have hit you all the way.

This is what happens when super smart people try to apply book logic to the real world. While the precieved chaos of the stop and go traffic going eastbound seems to be manageable by escorts its not. The reason is simple. The stop and go traffic has less to do with overall volume and more to do with human operation of vehicles through a bottleneck. The escorted traffic will never be faster than allowing the flow to operate organically. This is what I call artificial management of the wrong problem.

The real problem and the cause of the bottleneck is the tunnels on the East end of Idaho Springs. Humans have a psycological urge to slow down and use caution when approaching a small oppening from the wide open spaces. This urge is amplified in heavy traffic. Anyone that has 20 years of history in Denver remembers the same problem with the Staplton airport tunnels created by the NORTH/South runways over I-70. Adding more traffic lanes never helped. The only thing that removed the bottleneck was removing the runways creating the tunnels.......they could add more lanes through the tunnels at Idaho Springs but the bottleneck will not go away untill they remove the tunnels.

Well let's knock those Fockers down!