Traffic experts are warning that more buses, carpooling apps or even a gondola won’t by themselves curb Aspen’s congestion, and that real relief from gridlock will require pairing such options with disincentives to persuade drivers to leave their cars at home.
“All the [transportation-demand management] strategies should definitely stay in place, but I think the time has come where the carrot is reaching its capacity and we need to look at other options,” Ann Bowers, who is with the transportation consulting firm Fehr & Peers, said at an Aug. 7 meeting of the Transportation Coalition for the 21st Century.
The coalition is a community group of 28 members that has been meeting monthly since April to identify and discuss solutions to reduce traffic congestion in the upper valley. The group, which is expected to submit recommendations by December, has identified six community goals, including reducing Castle Creek Bridge traffic by 5,000 cars per day and cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 25,000 tons per year. In order to meet these goals, transportation experts who are helping the coalition reiterate that encouraging people to use alternative modes of transportation can do only so much without disincentives — some of which could include making parking more difficult or charging drivers a fee to enter Aspen.
Aspen City Council in July opted to move forward with a reevaluation of a 1998 record of decision regarding Highway 82 and the entrance to Aspen, which endorsed as its preferred alternative a four-lane road through Marolt Open Space, including one lane for general traffic and one lane for transit in each direction. The alternative was entering a new environmental impact statement process that would have given more consideration to other potential infrastructure changes.
A 2024 traffic-analysis memorandum by Jacobs Engineering, which assumes an annual traffic growth rate of 0.75% for peak hours, predicts that by 2050, the preferred alternative will cut travel time for general traffic by seven minutes from Fifth Street to Brush Creek Road in the evening peak hour, for a total trip duration of 9 minutes, 32 seconds. However, since peak traffic can back up well east of Fifth Street, the Jacobs analysis found that the preferred analysis would increase the “overall network delay” backup into downtown and throughout the West End neighborhoods by 7% compared with doing nothing, or a 169% increase from existing conditions. That’s due to the new traffic signal at Main and Seventh streets, which “constrains outbound flow from downtown Aspen.”
In the morning, congestion will not improve much either. The forecast estimates that it will take nearly 67 minutes to drive the 5.5-mile corridor entering Aspen during rush hours, which is identical to the “no-build” option, and up from the existing 32 minutes of travel time. The overall network delay is expected to be similar to the no-build option but up 142% from current conditions.
“If that’s all we do, we’re stuck with an hour and seven minutes from Brush Creek to the S-curve basically, and that is not a happy picture,” John Bennett, a former Aspen mayor and a coalition co-founder, told Pitkin County commissioners at an April 22 meeting, where he introduced the coalition and asked for an initial funding request of $18,000.
Adding more travel incentives or options will not reduce the amount of traffic entering Aspen, according to Fehr & Peers principal transportation engineer Chris Breiland. “There’s many, many options [not to drive], … but you won’t get rid of the congestion without a disincentive to driving,” he said.
Breiland explained at the Aug. 7 coalition meeting that the volume of traffic on Castle Creek Bridge has mostly been stable over the past 25 years and is even down slightly, recording in 2024 a daily average of 20,000 vehicles passing the city of Aspen’s counter located at the intersection of Cemetery Lane and Highway 82. That’s 15% lower than 1993 levels. Pitkin County has seen relatively modest population growth, with about 7% more residents in 2021 compared with 2001, according to state demographer’s estimates and Fehr & Peers presentation. Meanwhile, jobs in the county grew by 21% between 2001 and 2022, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and the population of Garfield County and Eagle County increased by 35% and 26%, respectively.
This demonstrates that the demand for driving is high, but as the highway’s capacity is fixed, it reaches an “equilibrium.”
“You can cram so much water through the pipes, and so we see that level flow,” Breiland said.
Meanwhile, the Colorado Department of Transportation’s counter in Snowmass Canyon, located on the highway near Snowmass Creek Road, is seeing an annual daily average number of vehicles that keeps rising, reaching 22,300 in 2024. That’s the highest level recorded since the counter was installed in 1993, when it counted a daily average of 12,400 vehicles. Although some of those vehicles are heading to Snowmass Village, Aspen’s schools or the hospital — or other destinations that don’t require crossing Castle Creek — this suggests that many vehicles are either bypassing the city counter or using the Brush Creek Park and Ride to board a free Roaring Fork Transportation Authority bus for the final leg of their commute.
“For decades now, the highway is sort of at this equilibrium point, and it’s managed by how many people would like to use the highway to get in and out of the city everyday versus how painful is it to sit in traffic,” Breiland said.
It’s worth noting that, according to a Jacobs traffic study using February 2024 data, about 15% of the total morning traffic and 34% of the evening traffic are using Power Plant Road during peak hours to bypass Castle Creek Bridge. That traffic is not captured by the city counter. This pushes the total traffic numbers higher than the 20,000 average daily traffic and closer to the 1993 levels of 23,600 vehicles a day, which was established as a threshold below which local leaders want to keep traffic.
For decades, the community has increased its investment in public transit to meet growing commuter demand. Roaring Fork Transportation Authority (RFTA) ridership has gone up 34% since 2000, reaching more than 5 million rides in 2024, while the bus rapid transit (BRT) system that debuted in 2013 reached about 1.1 million rides in 2024, surpassing local valley bus service for the first time.
“Because we have more people, more jobs, more activity, more large houses generating lots of activity in the county,” Breiland said, “there are people making trips and there is this background … latent demand.”
In other words, if more people use public transportation or carpool, traffic conditions will initially improve, but it will also encourage those who don’t currently drive due to congestion to use their car if that traffic isn’t as painful as it once was, which would increase congestion again. For that same reason, Breiland said that adding more road capacity doesn’t help either, because it’s going to encourage people to drive more. That’s what traffic experts call “induced demand.”
“If we want to get that number down, we have to have a reason for those people to switch, because they are making that choice now in light of a pretty inconvenient drive during peak periods,” Breiland said, adding that the most commonly used disincentives are pricing, whether on one lane or for general access, making parking more difficult or restricting vehicle access, such as with a reservation system to drive into town.
“Doing disincentives, I think, is necessary,” Aspen Mayor Rachel Richards said at the Aug. 7 meeting. ”I think you can structure it so that a carpool could be free and a single occupant is not, or certain license plates that residents can have x-many passes a month and then they start paying as well, or you know, various varieties of that.”
Congestion pricing
Fehr & Peers’ 2021 Integrated Mobility Study, commissioned by the Elected Officials Transportation Committee to evaluate the Integrated Mobility System (IMS) outlined in the Aspen Institute’s 2017 Upper Valley Mobility Report, supports that congestion pricing or dynamic roadway pricing paired with BRT enhancements is the most effective solution to reduce traffic congestion.
Breiland reiterated in May to the coalition that the packages “that include the cordon fee or the managed lane are the only options that actually serve in reducing the amount of greenhouse gas emissions and that’s where the 5,000 vehicle decrease [comes from]; it’s really under a cordon fee assumption that has the greatest effect.”
One option could be converting the existing HOV lane and bus-only lane to an express lane or high-occupancy toll lane, which by state law requires each vehicle to have at least three people to qualify as a toll-free vehicle. This is the system used by the CDOT express lanes in the Denver metro area and on Interstate 70 between Idaho Springs and Empire, where travelers can choose to drive free of charge in the adjacent lanes.
Another option is congestion pricing, also known as a cordon fee, which consists of making drivers pay a fee to enter a designated zone. London and Stockholm established cordon fees in 2003 and 2006-07, respectively, and New York City became the first U.S. city earlier this year to implement the concept. The city now charges $9 for drivers of passenger cars and small commercial vehicles to enter Manhattan below 60th Street between 5 a.m. and 9 p.m. on weekdays and 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. on weekends, and $2.25 during the overnight period.
Drivers in New York City can either link their license plate to an online account or receive the bill in the mail at the address of the registered vehicle. Passenger vehicles and motorcycles are charged the toll once per day upon entering the tolled zone, while drivers in trucks or charter and tour buses are charged for every entry.
So far, congestion pricing seems to have had a positive impact in New York City. A recent report from the Regional Plan Association, which uses data from Waze, estimates that traffic jams in Manhattan have dropped by 28.4% from 2024. The effects are also being felt beyond Manhattan. In New York’s four other boroughs, in New York’s Long Island and Westchester, and in New Jersey, the time lost to traffic jams decreased an average of 11.8%.
Another example is Valletta, Malta, one of the smallest capital cities in the world, with its 5,200 residents — relatively comparable to Aspen’s population. Valletta’s current congestion pricing applies an hourly charge after the first free 30 minutes. Vehicles are captured by cameras entering and exiting the zone, and a charge is calculated daily. The government implemented a park-and-ride system outside the city, extended the pedestrian area and improved public transportation.
Although congestion pricing may have been successfully implemented in larger cities, there’s still a lot of uncertainty around how effectively it could work or be accepted by commuters in the unique circumstances of Aspen and the Roaring Fork Valley.
“The Upper Valley Mobility Report identified that strong social-equity measures, such as enhanced and/or free alternative mobility options, are necessary to ensure the roadway toll is not a regressive tax,” the 2021 IMS report noted. “Implementing managed lanes on SH 82 would require less equity mitigation than a full cordon toll, as travelers could choose to drive for free in the general-purpose lanes.”
“You need downvalley support … because that’s a lot of the people who are being impacted,” Breiland said. The IMS report also pointed out that there are potential legal and political challenges to implementing congestion pricing on the state highway, as a cordon fee has never been implemented in Colorado. “While jurisdictions may designate HOV lanes and convert them to HOT/express lanes, there is no legislation explicitly authorizing the conversion of general-purpose lanes to tolled lanes,” the study noted.
Aspen Journalism reached out to CDOT for its take on how state policy would affect congestion pricing. The agency responded with a statement noting that federal authorities are in control. “Congestion pricing is overseen by the federal government,” according to CDOT. “Adding a toll to any federal-aid road would require federal approval.” Highway 82, which receives federal funding, is part of the National Highway System.
In November, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), which has jurisdiction over projects that require tolling authority, signed off on New York City’s congestion pricing program. But the Trump administration in February rescinded that approval because, according to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, it provides no toll-free option for many drivers and “the toll rate was set primarily to raise revenue for transit, rather than at an amount needed to reduce congestion.”
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which is running the program, and a New York bridge authority sued the Trump administration shortly after, and a federal judge blocked the order in May. The program keeps running while the case is being litigated. Duffy has deemed the program to be “a slap in the face to working-class Americans and small-business owners” because, he said in a press release, commuters have already paid for these highways through taxes. “Every American should be able to access New York City regardless of their economic means. It shouldn’t be reserved for an elite few.”
Congestion pricing would probably be viewed as inequitable by some segment of the Roaring Fork Valley traveling public who would see the fee as a burden or who already feel priced out of Aspen. Others might gladly pay a fee if it resulted in a meaningful reduction in peak-hour traffic. “On the SH 82 corridor, many workers commute into Aspen and Snowmass Village from areas where housing prices are lower, such as Carbondale and Glenwood Springs, since the housing prices in Aspen/Snowmass Village are some of the highest in the country,” the IMS study noted. “Other types of roadway users such as independent contractors (such as trucking and construction) may use the roadway differently and more frequently and these users may value time during the workday differently, therefore benefiting from time savings resulting from congestion pricing or managed lanes.”
Breiland restated this idea at the coalition’s June 5 meeting, presenting a graphic noting that “today, everybody traveling at the peak period pays a ‘fee,’” and that fee is their time. Most research does not find congestion pricing to be inherently inequitable, according to a Fehr & Peers presentation, since pricing revenue tends to be allocated to options that are used by lower-income commuters, such as transit, and some low-income individuals can get a discounted price.
“When it comes to congestion pricing, I anticipate that the idea would raise concerns here, especially among residents who work in Aspen or rely on travel upvalley for their livelihoods,” Glenwood Springs Mayor Marco Dehm told Aspen Journalism. “Many Glenwood residents already face high costs of living, long commutes and limited transit options. Adding a financial barrier could feel punitive unless it’s paired with meaningful improvements in alternative transportation.”
Dehm thinks congestion pricing would receive mixed reactions: Some people would welcome congestion relief, while many working families would see it as an added hardship. “I believe any conversation about congestion pricing must include the downvalley communities from the outset, so residents feel like stakeholders rather than afterthoughts,” he wrote.
Dehm acknowledged the urgency of addressing traffic congestion and the needs for both incentives and disincentives, but “if disincentives like pricing are considered, they should be carefully designed to avoid unfairly impacting those who have no realistic alternatives to driving … . Any proposal will need to consider equity, practicality and regional collaboration. We would strongly encourage Aspen and Pitkin County to include downvalley voices in these discussions early and often.”
Bennett said that the coalition is still in the information gathering stage and hasn’t decided what measures it might end up recommending, but if it decides to pursue the congestion pricing idea, the goal is to make traveling cheaper and easier for everyone, not just those who afford to pay a congestion fee. “It’s about improving convenience and time for all travellers,” he told Aspen Journalism. “So many alternatives would exist that paying a congestion fee would essentially be an option, not a requirement … . Choosing any of these options [such as carpooling, taking the bus or driving during off-peak hours] might require a (relatively small) change of commuting habits, but the personal gain to anyone as a commuter would be huge.”
Encouraging carpooling and RFTA’s future
Any disincentives would need to be applied in conjunction with other options to successfully reduce traffic. Breiland estimates that meeting the coalition’s goal of reducing trips on Castle Creek Bridge by 5,000 trips per day will require 80-100 additional daily bus trips. Also, Fehr & Peers, which recently conducted a study on vehicle occupancy at the entrance of town, estimates that more than 30,000 seats are available in private vehicles and could be utilized for carpooling.
Earlier in August, Carbondale-based energy consulting organization Clean Energy Economy for the Region (CLEER) launched a pilot program with the Two Rivers Connect app. The app encourages users to drive less and, instead, bike, walk, carpool or hop on the bus, with rewards including lift tickets, e-bikes and gift cards. Partners include Garfield County, Parachute, Rifle, Silt, New Castle, Glenwood Springs, Carbondale, Colorado Mountain College, Holy Cross Energy and RFTA.
CLEER is also working with the Aspen School District in an attempt to encourage students to carpool and reduce traffic delays caused by campus dropoffs and pickups. Every day, more than 300 cars drive from Aspen through the Maroon Creek roundabout to dropoff points on Maroon Creek or Castle Creek roads, and then return to Aspen, generating 11-13 minutes of delay between 7:45 a.m. and 8:30 a.m. for cars driving upvalley into town, according to Jacobs. These cars represent about 43% of traffic using the roundabout for a dropoff or a pickup on Maroon Creek and Castle Creek roads.
“The main reasons I hear from parents about why they’re not riding the school bus in the morning is timing, too early, it’s where I get my quality time with the kid in the morning, and we have to drive to our bus stop anyway, we’re already in the car so we might just drive all the way,” Reghan Mahaffey, Aspen School District’s director of transportation, said at the Aug. 7 meeting. “They don’t understand the impact they’re having with the rest of the traffic either.”
Mahaffey said the least-utilized school bus routes serve areas closest to the schools, including Burlingame routes and two routes through Aspen. She said she has been able to rework the Burlingame routes but cannot do so with the town routes due to where they can pick up students. “We essentially have 50 seats available between those two [town] buses,” Mahaffey said.
Jamie Tatsuno, RFTA’s public information officer, said the agency is focusing on its zero-fare October and November pilot program, through which it will gather data on ridership trends, park-and-ride usage and operational impacts to guide future fare and service decisions. There are no current or immediate plans to expand BRT service, although RFTA CEO Kurt Ravenschlag said at the Aug. 7 meeting that staff is going to bring a proposal to the board in September asking to increase the number of BRT trips for this winter season. RFTA is also hoping to start conducting a service-optimization study in January that will help it better understand where to allocate resources, as well as new funding opportunities that will become available in 2026.
“So, there are things changing. There’s things that we’re proactively doing to add capacity to the existing system,” Ravenschlag said. “Unfortunately, when the BRT opened back in 2014, … we didn’t have the appropriate capacity, service or parking to accommodate that demand, but we’re hoping that we’re going to be able to start making progress.”
Earlier in the meeting, as the Aspen Daily News previously reported, the coalition heard a presentation by Kent Sharp, president and CEO of SE Group, a mountain planning and landscape architecture firm, about aerial ropeway projects and how they could alleviate traffic congestion. Hypothetically, a gondola transit system in Aspen could transport passengers from Brush Creek Park and Ride to downtown with potential stops at Snowmass, the airport, Buttermilk and Aspen Highlands, and the system could, according to Sharp, possibly remove 1,700 cars from Highway 82.
A thriving resort economy that induces traffic
There are many factors that are feeding Aspen’s travel demand. As housing costs have increased, people have moved farther downvalley, resulting in longer commute times.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s LEHD Origin-Destination Employment Statistics, in 2022, 65% of Aspen workers lived at least 10 miles away and 23% lived at least 50 miles away. Although the number of workers in Aspen went up by 14% between 2002 and 2022, the number of those living less than 10 miles away dropped by 5%, but the number of workers with a 25- to 50-mile commute grew 30% and workers with a commute of more than 50 miles grew 47%.
About one-third of the traffic entering and leaving Aspen is construction-related, according to data collected by the recently installed Rekor counters.
The Elected Officials Transportation Committee (EOTC), made up of representatives from the city of Aspen, Pitkin County and town of Snowmass Village, released in May a Travel Data Report Spring 2025 using data from the counters, which are powered by artificial intelligence. The report used April 22 and 29 as traffic snapshots. Forty-four percent of traffic on Power Plant Road on April 22 and 43% of McLain Flats traffic on April 29 were pickup trucks and vans, compared with 31% of traffic on Castle Creek Bridge on April 22.
“This may suggest that drivers using Power Plant are taking the McLain Flats Road ‘detour’ from downvalley destinations and are more likely to be part of the ‘trade parade’ from downvalley than drivers using the Castle Creek Bridge,” the report noted.
The 2025 Intensity Studies White Paper, released in July and prepared by Design Workshop and GBSM for the Pitkin County planning project Vision 2050 that intends to update policy and regulations to meet the county’s climate goals, has found that Pitkin County has seen a shift in its economy. Construction jobs headquartered in Pitkin County have dropped 16% between 2010 and 2022, but they have increased in adjacent counties, growing 37% in Garfield County and 25% in Eagle County. “The demand for home construction, operations and maintenance in Pitkin County has increased. … This indicates that workers are increasingly living outside of Pitkin County and traveling [greater] distances to job sites,” the study found.
Fifty-seven percent of construction jobs at companies located in the Roaring Fork Valley are tied to construction sites in Pitkin County, according to a job-generation analysis released from consulting firm RPI in July as part of the intensity studies for Vision 2050. Fifty-eight percent of the jobs occurring at a single-family residence in Pitkin County, including construction, operation and maintenance, are reported at firms headquartered somewhere from Basalt to Parachute.
Meanwhile, tourism-related jobs in Pitkin County have increased 13%, and real estate, development and wealth-management jobs have grown 49%.
“The large residential homes [above 5,750 square feet] are not acting like homes, those are acting like commercial nodes,” Pitkin County Deputy Manager Kara Silbernagel said at the Aug. 7 meeting, because these larger homes are generating 71% of the new residential-related jobs in the past five years. Since 2023, Pitkin County has capped new-home maximum size at 9,250 square feet, down from about 15,000 square feet, while some areas have adopted stricter limits.
“This has really led to misalignment between the investments that we’ve made as a community into our infrastructure and nodes of activity,” she said. “We invested in a bus rapid transit system, we’ve invested in a lot of different means assuming people are going to work from a place, they’re feeding into Highway 82 and then they’re going to work within our regular activity node, but now these homes are acting as activity nodes that are outside that traditional infrastructure that we’ve invested in as a community, and that has real impacts to our quality of life values, our climate.”
The July 2025 Transportation Intensity Study from Kimley Horn, which is part of the Vision 2050 effort, shows that the number of employee trips — by landscapers, property managers, cleaners and others — increases significantly as a home gets larger and those trips persist year-round. “The largest homes generate nearly 10 times more employee trips (4.87 per day) compared to smaller homes (0.5 per day),” as summarized in the white paper.
Homes with more than 5,750 square feet represent only 14% of unincorporated Pitkin County’s housing stock, but they account for 19.5% of all daily residential trips (including residents and employees) and 24% of all residential vehicle miles traveled.
Aspen has also seen its number of cultural events grow over the years. Aspen Journalism recently reported that a 2019 study tallied 275 unique performance programs totaling 709 shows; 14 festivals or fairs; 266 class, workshop or lecture offerings; 117 film-screening events; 21 unique tours totaling 568 sessions; and many other events.
The increased number of festivals and other events is boosting Aspen and the upper valley’s attractiveness and resort economy, but it can also put a strain on infrastructure, traffic and local workers. “Do we really need three concerts in June and four in November?” Richards asked at the coalition meeting. “There’s other factors other than the transportation systems that are driving our problems.”
This story was published in the Sept. 4 edition of Aspen Daily News.