How Vail is keeping the dream alive to tunnel or bury I-70
First broached by the town in the 1990s, could Vail ever see the concept come to fruition?
Chris Dillmann/Vail Daily archive
For nearly as long as I-70 has run through Vail, the idea to tunnel or bury I-70 through town has periodically risen to the surface. Whether over noise complaints or over safety, air pollution, traffic congestion and other concerns, the concept — now estimated to cost well above $7 billion — is one that Vail can’t seem to kick completely.
“It all comes back to noise,” said Tom Kassmel, Vail’s town engineer. “Noise from the interstate has been an ongoing issue in the town of Vail, and burying and/or relocating the interstate is obviously the complete solution to the interstate noise issue. I think that’s why it keeps coming up and people continuously ask about it every few years.”
Most recently, the Vail Town Council discussed the concept as part of its revamped transportation and mobility plan, GoVail 2040, which it formally adopted in July. The plan brings updates to the idea of covering or tunneling I-70 in Vail, adding new cost estimates, questions and scenarios to the decades-long dialogue.
Whether burying the current interstate or tunneling and relocating the highway beneath Vail Mountain, the project would likely take decades to come to fruition. All it would take was a nod from the Town Council for Vail to truly begin studying, planning and financing such a project.
Vail Council member Jonathan Staufer broached the topic at the council’s Tuesday, Aug. 6, meeting, asking for “four hands” from the council to direct staff to reallocate funds from a wildlife bridge project in Dowd Junction to “take a serious look at burying I-70.”
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While the council didn’t make the directive to allocate the funds, they did agree to have a conversation about the possibility.
Where did the idea come from?
According to Vail’s mobility and transportation master plan, “burying I-70” was an idea “as early as the 1970s in conjunction with the potential Colorado bid for the Winter Olympics,” which coincides with when the interstate first came through town.
The idea was brought back up in the ’80s as noise complaints about the interstate continued. However, it wasn’t until the 1990s that the idea was seriously discussed by the Town Council.
In June 1993, the Vail Trail reported that Jack Varga, a former Vail bus driver, had included tunneling I-70 as part of his thesis as a graduate student at Colorado State University in 1991. The idea then caught the interest of various architectural and engineering firms, the article adds. In 1992, Varga toured the idea around town, according to other reports from the paper.
“Many people have long thought that I-70 was both the best and worst thing that has ever happened to Vail and for many years the idea of putting at least a portion of the highway in a tunnel has been discussed,” the Vail Trail reported in its June 11, 1993 issue.
That June Varga, joined by representatives of the Colorado Department of Transportation, Taliesin Architects and the HNTB Corporation, presented to the Vail Town Council and County Commissioners, soliciting funds for a planning study, according to the articles at the time.
In another Vail Trail article, it was reported that Varga saw “Interstate 70 as an intrusive factor that physically separates the community, presents a barrier to growth, and creates traffic congestion in town.”
The article adds that a lid would “ease the impact of the transportation corridor while at the same time creating about 65 acres of usable land on top of the ‘lid.'”
However, by July 1993, the idea was “buried” in concerns over the price tag, the Vail Trail reported. At the time, tunneling a 1.2-mile stretch of the interstate between Vail Village and Lionshead was roughly estimated to cost between $50 million to $90 million.
“I think it puts Vail in the light of throwing money to the wind. It’s not the image we want,” said Council member Tom Steinberg, according to the July Vail Trail article.
Seven years later the idea resurfaced. In June 2000, the Vail Trail reported that the Town Council renewed talks, “in a more serious way, about putting at least portions of I-70 underground,” bolstered by growing noise complaints.
In 2002, the idea was included in the town’s Transportation Master Plan update.
Then, in 2005, the first real study was performed on the idea. The resulting “Vail Tunnel Options” study, looked at the idea of relocating I-70 into a tunnel away from the town core as well as the initial “cut-and-cover” concept.
In explaining the difference between the two, Kassmel said a cut and cover project would essentially “bury the interstate in place,” lowering it and bridging over it, creating new developable land.
Tunneling was then later presented as a potentially more “desirable” concept, in part because construction would be less disruptive, Kassmel added. In these concepts, the current interstate would be “deconstructed” and available lands could be used for redevelopment or a local commuter road.
The 2005 study looked at one cut-and-cover option and four options for tunneling, including some that would take the interstate beneath Vail Mountain.
In the two tunnel options recommended by the plan, the eastern tunnel entrance would begin in the Narrows section of Vail Pass and extend over toward Minturn or Dowd Junction, Kassmel said.
At the time, it was estimated such a project would cost anywhere from $2.8 to $3.6 billion and never went much further than the plan, according to a 2006 Vail Daily article.
Since 2006, while the concept has intermittently come back into the town chatter — for example, it was included in Vail’s 2009 transportation master plan and the Vail Homeowners Association heard a presentation on a concept in 2016 — the town hasn’t dove back in until its recent master planning effort.
Where does the concept stand today?
The town began the process of updating its 2009 transportation master plan in 2022. With these planning processes, Kassmel said that they typically take the existing plan elements and update them (in addition to bringing in new ideas).
“One of those elements was the tunneling of I-70,” he said. “It’s not like we were reviving it or bringing it back, we’re just more so keeping the dream alive.”
While this did include discussions about whether to eliminate the project, ultimately town staff and Town Council decided there was no real reason to leave it out.
“Sometimes it just takes the right timing and opportunity to kindle a fire and make a project go,” Kassmel said. “That’s a good reason to keep them in the master plans because you never know what’s coming down the future, where funding might come from, who might be the advocate to make this type of project happen.”
As such, the adopted GoVail plan does update some of the previous information from 2006 and 2009 around tunneling or covering the interstate. This includes not only an updated cost estimate but also a look at additional factors not previously considered.
For the plan, the town conducted a “rough order of magnitude” to estimate what such a project could cost today, Kassmel said. This estimate took into account construction costs, costs of additional infrastructure, design and the general scope of work.
“Using typical construction cost escalation, we increased those numbers to the $7.5, $7.8 billion that is shown in the master plan currently,” he said.
The new plan also delves into how different tunnel and cover options could change the landscape and character of Vail.
“If you relocated I-70, buried it and you developed every acre that was available, the town of Vail itself would change in density significantly, almost doubling in size. So we wanted to make sure that this updated document not only updated the cost, but also updated and brought to the surface the possible changes to Vail if something like this were to be done,” Kassmel said.
In doing so, the plan presents various scenarios with differing percentages of open space and density on the developable land, also estimating what costs could be recouped as a result of development in each.
The plan also looks at how local road alignment would change, possible increases to operation costs, construction impacts, required public infrastructure and more.
What would it take to see the project constructed?
With where the concept and plan sit today, “it would take action of Town Council,” for it to move forward, Kassmel said.
“The next best steps is to have a little bit more of a formal process, more of a feasibility study that brings in stakeholders and the public and has more formal input specifically on the project to understand what are the challenges, what are the hurdles to identify whether it is worthwhile to continue moving it forward,” Kassmel said.
“The largest obstacle, obviously, is cost,” he added.
However, getting the project to gain widespread support would also require there be an “appetite for significant redevelopment,” Kassmel said.
With this, the next steps would be not only including the financing piece but also “understanding the desire for the town to embrace this type of project,” he added.
No matter what, a project of this magnitude would be a “decades, plural, long project,” Kassmel said.
“It’d be tens of years to get us started planning, design, and funding. Once the first shovel went in the ground, it would definitely be a multi-year project,” he added.
