Colorado is in the top 10 states for bad highway pavement and increased traffic

Don’t let this news lead to an increase in road rage please because then we’ll probably be in the top 10 for that too.

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Cars speed by on I-70 in between residential swaths of Globeville. (Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite)  1-70; highway; infrastructure; development; kevinjbeaty; denver; colorado; globeville; denverite;

Cars speed by on I-70 in between residential swaths of Globeville. (Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite)

Don’t let this news lead to an increase in road rage please because then we’ll probably be in the top 10 for that too.

Colorado ranked in the top 10 states for poor and mediocre highway pavement conditions, greatest share of interstate bridges rated structurally deficient and greatest increase in vehicle miles of travel, according to a new report from research group TRIP.

See exactly where the state ranked after the jump.

Six percent of Colorado's interstate pavement is in poor condition and 16 percent is in mediocre condition, according to the report.

Sixteen percent of Colorado's interstate pavement is in mediocre condition, according to the report.

Colorado had the sixth biggest share of pavement in poor or mediocre condition, according to the report. Only 6 percent of interstate pavement was in poor condition however.

That actually squares pretty closely with the Colorado Department of Transportation’s take on road conditions. CDOT says 21 percent of its pavement has “low drivability life,” meaning that there’s only four more years that the roads will be acceptable for driving. In the meantime …

“Drivers may need to endure rough rides, reduce speeds to navigate around potholes and other types of pavement damage or otherwise compensate for deteriorating conditions,” the agency says on its website.

But if that wasn’t enough, Colorado is also among the top 10 states with the biggest increases in miles of travel on its highways from 2000 to 2014.

TRIP Colorado CDOT VMT

The state was fourth overall for increases in travel, with 33 percent more interstate travel since 2000. So it probably won’t come as a surprise that the report found that 51 percent of Colorado’s urban highways are congested.

The cherry on top is that Colorado is also among the top 10 states that have bridges with structural deficiencies, coming in eighth.

Six percent of Colorado's bridges are structurally deficient.

Six percent of Colorado's bridges are structurally deficient.

Six percent may not sound like that many, but as recently as 2015, several of these bridges were in the Denver downtown area, with as many as 183,000 crossings a day.

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