The Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) is already underway with the Floyd Hill project on Interstate 70. The $700 million multi-year infrastructure project aims to relieve congestion and improve safety along the 8 mile stretch of I-70.
Last month, CDOT began phase one of the three phase project.
“From a public works perspective, this is huge,” said Skyler McKinley, spokesperson for AAA Colorado. “That area has always been a chokepoint, and it’s a significant area for safety concerns.”
Last year, CDOT was awarded $100 million in federal funding for the project. The funding came from the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), and was the largest competitive grant CDOT has received from the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT).
The remaining $600 million is from state funds, according to CDOT spokesperson Stacia Sellers.
Work has begun on the project with crews building a wildlife underpass and setting up work zones for rock blasting that will help straighten existing curves in the road.
According to Sellers, traffic may be stopped for 20 minutes at a time due to blasting, though those holds will only occur on weekdays between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m.
“We can see rear-end crashes within the area, so we knew these issues needed to be addressed,” Sellers said.
Some of the improvements are adding a third westbound travel lane, rebuilding bridges that have been damaged by heavy use, constructing a 2-mile section of Front Range Road between U.S. Highway 6 and the Hidden Valley and Central City Parkway interchanges, and building an extended on-ramp from U.S. Highway 6 onto eastbound I-70 for slow-moving vehicles to merge.
Work on the project’s centerpiece will not begin until spring of next year.
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Source: Summitdaily.com
