Let’s say you’re a traffic engineer in charge of a roadway that transports thousands of cars a day. You need to manage a confluence of four different roads, all of which have differing traffic volumes based on the time of day. A traffic light has already failed, and you want to make everyone wait so no one feels left out. Ooh, I have an idea! A roundabout!
No, it probably didn’t go that way. When Aspen put in the roundabout at the Castle Creek-Maroon Creek-SH82 intersection, maybe they truly believed it would be the best solution. Maybe that was true when it was built in 2001, but even in 2016, the roundabout caused hour-long delays. Today, companies are forced to charge an extra fee for jobs in Aspen because their employees must wait at the roundabout, local Greg Goldfarb writes. There is no clear solution, at least not a published one, but the writers of multiple proposals agree: something needs to change.
The problem is simple. At the start of the work and school day, a significant portion of Aspen’s more than 2,000 daily entering cars are all on the road at the same time. These vehicles are confined to a single lane with a choke point at the roundabout, and the traffic backup is often miles long because it takes time for each car to go into the circle. Roundabouts in other countries are built completely flat, so drivers can see across to the other side and are barely slowed down. Aspen wanted to make the roundabout beautiful, though, so the landscaping in the middle blocks the view of other cars and contributes to the traffic.
This same traffic happens at 5:00PM too – but there, the issue becomes the single lane leaving Aspen. A solution proposed for this entrance is called the ‘Straight Shot’ – allowing all of this Aspen-bound traffic to have its own lane – but this does not remove the problem of the roundabout, it just circumvents it. The Straight Shot will still cause a traffic choke point when the new roadway re-enters the main flow of Aspen traffic. Even the traffic light proposed at the end of the road will not eliminate this issue because Main Street and the new road still have to join eventually.
As an Aspen High School student, I am uniquely positioned to notice the impact that the roundabout has on after-school traffic. Every single car leaving Aspen Highlands, the Maroon Bells, and the Aspen School District has to funnel through the roundabout. This is not only a headache but a safety risk because so many cars joining a roundabout increase the potential of accidents.
My parents always told me that if I brought up a problem, I had to give an answer too. I am not a traffic engineer, and the City of Aspen does not have billions of dollars to spend on traffic, so I cannot provide a reasonable one. That said, many of the cars and trucks that enter Aspen or go to Aspen High School do not have heavy equipment. This means their drivers could park somewhere and take public transportation the rest of the way. Aspen could instill a permitting system to drive past Buttermilk and create robust transportation methods – I would recommend a sky gondola or a train, either of which is expensive but fast – to move the rest of the population. This would also provide more funding for the city. The parking system at Buttermilk would have to be rebuilt, likely with a massive underground garage, but if Aspen could pull it all off? The roundabout, no longer congested with thousands of vehicles, could actually work again.