Twenty Years Ago This Week: Miller Hudson, executive director for the Colorado Intermountain Fixed Guideway Authority, said he was forging ahead with plans to develop an overhead monorail to alleviate the congestion on Colorado’s highways and interstates.
CIFGA was created in 1998 by the state legislature to explore the possibility of a high-speed transportation system along Interstate 70. Facing public opposition from Gov. Bill Owens and Tom Norton, head of the state department of transportation, Hudson took a leave of absence from his position at CIFGA, to collect signatures for a ballot question in November.
Hudson said voters would be asked to allocate $50 million of surplus state funds to build a monorail train with a “linear induction” motor, the same motor that was invented in the 1980s to launch satellites.
“We have to turn in 80,400 signatures by August 6,” Hudson said, “and we are in the happy predicament — we are collecting far faster than we thought we would. This means we will turn in 100,000 or 110,000 signatures, because there’s always a 15 to 20 percent error rate.”
Hudson had guided a bill in the state legislature earlier in the year to allocate $25 million to test the engine’s performance between Silverthorne and Frisco and $100 million to construct a pilot track from DIA to Eagle County Airport, but the bill died in committee.
Owens referred to the monorail as a “Disneyland ride.”
Miller Hudson
“I understand where Norton and Owens are coming from,” Hudson said. “I’ve known Bill Owens for over 20 years, and I think he comes from a position of integrity. He honestly believes you can’t get people out of their cars, but I think he’s wrong. It’s an honest difference of opinion.”
Hudson said that this sort of forward thinking was necessary to address issues that would arise in the coming decades.
“We are trying to solve a problem for 2050,” he said. “That’s the whole purpose of this major investment study. We put a 50-year timeline on it. If we were trying to solve for 2010, you could ask why we want to spend that much on transit. We can widen lanes, but as soon as we finish the first two lanes, we need two more. The real question is — are we going to take the long view?”
Hudson argued that not only would the monorail provide a superior traveling experience but the fact that it would be positioned 10 to 15 feet off the ground made it perfect for Colorado.
“If you look at what closes down the highway — mudslides, rockslides, avalanches and wildlife — you avoid those by getting up in the air,” Hudson said. “You also don’t have grade crossings like with a train. The safety issues made us say that the most sensible thing is to put it up in the air.”
Hudson also contended that blizzards wouldn’t stop the monorail and that it would run through 20 inches of snow and 100 mile per hour crosswinds.
CIFGA was funded by counties and towns along I-70 but Hudson was looking to expand into the private sector.
“There’s an old adage — that the public sector builds light rail but the private sector builds monorails,” Hudson said. “The Associate Press did a story on it — including the Governor doing his amusement park quote. But they tagged an instant vote on it: Do you think this is a good alternative to the automobile? CNN picked it up, it ran nationally and 91% said ‘yes.’”
Rachael Wright is the author of the Captain Savva Mystery series, with degrees in Political Science and History from Colorado Mesa University, and is a contributing writer to Colorado Politics and The Gazette.
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A LOOK BACK | Hudson fights for mountain monorail along I-70 - coloradopolitics.com
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