Coloradans hitting road, sky
1.8 million — a record — are expected to be traveling over this holiday season.
An estimated 1.8 million Coloradans will be traveling over this double-whammy holiday season, putting an exclamation point on a record-breaking year of travel for the state.
AAA Colorado’s numbers — covering the holiday period starting Saturday and running through Jan. 1 — include travel by planes, trains and automobiles, as well as other forms of transportation.
This year marks the ninth consecutive year of rising holiday travel by Coloradans, according to AAA, North America’s largest motoring and leisure travel organization. The state’s population growth in recent years contributes to travel growth, especially around the Christmas and New Year’s holidays.
“We are chock-full of new people moving to our state, especially a metropolis like Denver,” said Skyler McKinley, a AAA Colorado spokesman. “Wherever you have a large population who hail from elsewhere, there is going to be a lot of people traveling.”
Add in Denver International Airport, among the busiest airports in the nation, and the confluence of Interstates 25 and 70 — and Denver is particularly primed for travel.
Of the state’s 1.8 million travelers, according to the AAA analysis, 1.7 million will hit the road in automobiles, a 3.3 percent increase over last year. Drivers in the state will experience the most expensive year-end gas prices since 2014, paying about $2.45 per gallon for regular gasoline, which is 32 cents more over last year. Prices should drop after Christmas, about 5 cents, saving drivers a bit of money on the return trip home.
The Colorado Department of Transportation expects heavy traffic in the westbound lanes of the I-70 corridor west of Denver through the Christmas holiday weekend and into next week as people take extended vacations in ski country. Eastbound traffic in the corridor will probably increase Tuesday and subsequent days, as some holiday travelers opt to head home after Christmas.
In Denver, wintry weather’s role on traffic should not come into play over the next week, except Saturday when there’s a 20 percent chance of snow after 4 p.m., according to the National Weather Service. Travel conditions in the mountains shouldn’t be too extreme either.
At DIA, an estimated 1.19 million passengers will have passed through the complex in the week ending Christmas Day, according to airport officials. From Tuesday through New Year’s Day, the airport expects about 1.24 million passengers. Those numbers are up slightly from last year.