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Letter: No danger in doubling lanes

Success!

A hard-core Aspen establishment dinosaur finally awoke from his slumber, took the bait and provided us with a really silly statement regarding the Entrance to Aspen. Thanks to Mick Ireland for providing us with this predictable gem: “As one of my friends says, just fix the highway. Easy to understand, commonsensical. Also, a cure worse than the disease.”

If you double the highway lanes from two to four (lanes that everyone can use, not bus lanes), the only way conditions could be as bad as they are now, let alone worse, is if twice as many people came into and out of Aspen every day. The reason Mick doesn’t grasp this is because there are no people in his view of public policy. Those aren’t real human beings losing sizable chunks of their finite lives in the mess at the entrance — those are just cars.



People traveling by car from outside the area, for whatever reason, aren’t going to be encouraged or deterred by conditions that exist on 2 miles of highway. So Mick’s claim, whether he realizes it or not, is that tens of thousands of Roaring Fork Valley residents who currently don’t come to Aspen — solely due to the traffic jam — will begin to do so on a daily basis once it is fixed.

That’s not possible, because there is no such population.




Who’s next?

Jeffrey Evans

Basalt