Time Machine Tuesday: Traffic Data

As more and more people move to Colorado, we all spend a lot more of our time sitting in traffic. Colorado’s highways were constructed in the mid-twentieth century, when the population was much lower. So how does your daily commute compare with a half-century ago?

In 1971, the Colorado Division of Highways released Traffic Volumes on Urban Freeways in Colorado, a report containing graphs and charts with average weekday traffic volumes for Colorado’s highways. You can compare these numbers to the current traffic volumes, which are available in the Colorado Department of Transportation’s Online Transportation Information System (OTIS) database, for some pretty amazing results!