A tussle over gridlocked traffic along Interstate 270 north of Denver in Commerce City offers a telling snapshot of the statewide debate over the future of transportation. It’s a potent reminder of the phony pretexts and ulterior motives driving the war on cars in Colorado. An in-depth report b y The Gazette this week looks at pending proposals to clear the bottleneck along the perpetually congested stretch of highway. Any practical solution clearly must involve expanding capacity with additional lanes.  Colorado has grown, after all, and so have the state’s transportation needs. Whether it’s commuters driving to distant workplaces; youth soccer teams trying to get to the game on time; seniors heading to medical appointments, or semis hauling tomorrow’s groceries, all have to get from Point A to Point B. And they sure won’t get there by bus or train. The highway corridor now handles more than 100,000 vehicles every day, with up to 17% of those vehicles being freight trucks. Not only is traffic constantly backed up but the infrastructure of the highway itself is deteriorating and urgently in need of repair.  Sound familiar? It’s a recurring theme in every quarter of Colorado. As The Gazette reports, Colorado Department of Transportation officials have studied the I-270 corridor for years and have recommended adding a toll lane to the two-lane highway. That could ease the pinch. But the usual activist groups — who orchestrate an outcry at every sensible attempt to improve our state’s transportation grid — are attempting to erect roadblocks. And they’re using their same old, pat arguments that, when thought through, make little sense. Environmental advocacy group GreenLatinos, for example, insists more lanes won’t help and only will cause more health woes for adjoining neighborhoods. The national group’s local point man insists the proposed upgrade’s roughly $800 million cost would be better spent, “to generally serve the community than just add another lane that will just add cost in the future.” An official with national environmental-activist law firm EarthJustice, which has been lobbying the state against the upgrade, claims, “science and experience have shown that adding lanes to urban corridors like this one only increases the number of vehicles using the highway.” Of course, academia is in on the act, too. A professor at University of California-Davis recently used an old chestnut of the environmental movement in addressing state transportation commissioners, vaguely contending the state ought to invest instead in  “sustainable multimodal options communities are asking for.”  Green Latinos even has offered up an alternative plan. In part, the scheme would use tolling to discourage traffic by prioritizing the likes of buses and local residents with lower tolls. It would use automated license plate readers. All of which is absurd. Don’t nearby residents affected by auto emissions face an even more potent threat when the same automobiles are idling in gridlock? Doesn’t the claim that more lanes lure more cars have it backward — that in fact more cars already have arrived, necessitating more lanes?  And as for multimodal options, they are talking about bikes and buses. Again.  It all amounts to an act of denial in hopes of creating a diversion. They know there are no practical alternatives to the autonomy, flexibility, efficiency and sheer practicality of private passenger vehicles — but the activists can’t admit to it because they are beholden to a dogma that despises cars. And those same activists are sure to attack whenever there are plans to create more surface space for those cars — even though almost all of us depend on our personal vehicles. Enough of their daydreams, already. It’s time to move on from such silliness so Colorado can get moving again. We need to make way for the type of transportation that matters. ...read more read less