I-25

From Berthoud to the Wyoming border, Interstate 25 is Northern Colorado’s new Main Street, as new retail outlets, new industry, new entertainment venues, new health-care facilities and new housing units spring up alongside.

The twin ribbons of blacktop that bisect eastern and western Colorado along the base of the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains are only about 40 years old. But north of Denver, this highway wields ever-growing influence on patterns of growth and development as well as transportation. In virtually every Northern Colorado town adjacent to I-25, the focus has shifted from downtown to the interstate.

Over the past decade, in fact, some of these towns have launched boardroom battles over which municipality should rightfully annex which chunk of land adjacent to increasingly coveted access points along the freeway.

Built in chunks between 1962 and 1967, I-25 marks a thoroughfare much older than the current concrete and asphalt structure. The interstate was constructed more or less on top of U.S. Highway 87; from New Mexico to Wyoming it follows almost entirely the same alignment.

I-25, its odd number designating a north-south roadway, stretches from Interstate 10 in Las Cruces, N.M., to Interstate 90 in Buffalo, Wyo. Of 1,063 total miles, 300 traverse Colorado. Traffic counts ebb and flow as the road makes its way from Raton Pass on the Colorado-New Mexico border through burgeoning metro areas and on to the still rural Colorado-Wyoming boundary.

The 2004 average annual daily traffic count was 9,700 at the New Mexico border. That number swells to 71,700 at Pueblo’s 13th Street. By Denver’s Park Avenue West, I-25 handles 243,300 cars per day, garnering honors as the busiest stretch of highway in the state. By U.S. Highway 34 the number is 42,200; north of Harmony Road it is 33,300. An average of 13,500 cars cross the Wyoming border each day.

I-25 is part of much larger system of roadways that snakes across the United States. The vast network of interstates constructed as part of the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways contains more than 42,700 miles of at least four-lane roadways.

Envisioned as early as the 1930s and pushed by U.S. automobile manufacturers, the interstate system was born in 1956 when Eisenhower signed the legislation that steered fuel taxes into the Highway Trust Fund. As a result, the federal government paid for 90 percent of the cost of interstate highway construction. The states made up the rest and got ownership, design control and maintenance responsibilities. The entire system cost $114 billion to build over 35 years.

For years, I-25 traversed Northern Colorado relatively quietly. Passing through acre after acre of dryland wheat, feed corn and sugar beets, it was the domain of over-the-road truckers and tourists counting cattle and ogling the sweeping Rocky Mountain vista.

In the 1970s and ’80s, as more and more women entered the workforce and Northern Colorado’s cities grew, so did traffic on I-25.

By the 1990s, the Main Street moniker was beginning to bounce around the northern I-25 corridor. Northern Colorado was increasingly a regional economy as commuters left their homes in one community for work in others.

Today, the interstate highway is indeed Main Street for the thousands of residents of Northern Colorado who traverse it each day heading from home to work, school, shopping and back again.

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