Broomfield, Colorado
Colorado
The road you'd take from Denver to Boulder was the first toll road in America to pay itself off and go free.
The Denver to Boulder Turnpike was built to speed cars between the state capital and the university town. Work started in 1950, and it opened to traffic in January of 1952. The only toll plaza sat right here in Broomfield. A dime got you from Federal Boulevard to Broomfield. Another fifteen cents carried you on to Boulder. The whole run cost a quarter. Commuters used it so heavily that Broomfield turned into a popular place to live. Then in September of 1967, the turnpike finished paying off its construction and operating costs, and the tolls came down for good. It was the first public toll road in the United States to become free. The route became U.S. 36, running from Denver through Boulder toward Rocky Mountain National Park. Broomfield kept growing after that, annexing land until it sprawled across four different counties. Tired of four county governments and four court districts, the city won a constitutional amendment and became its own county in 2001, the newest county in the entire country.
Wayside reads this to you as you drive past, timed to arrive before the place does. Plan a route through here.
The turnpike became the first public toll road in the United States to become free.
Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Nearby, on the same roads
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- Westminster, Colorado 4.9 mi A university here closed in 1917 because every single student left to fight in World War One.
- Columbine Mine massacre 5.1 mi A twenty-one-year-old miner died carrying an American flag that was found with seventeen bullet holes in it.
- Standley Lake 7.4 mi The dam holding back Standley Lake was meant to be the largest earth-filled dam in the world, and it started cracking a year after it was finished.
- Disappearances of Paul and Sarah Skiba and Lorenzo Chivers 9 mi Police thought a father had run off with his daughter, until his friends climbed the fence and found bullet holes and a piece of human scalp on his moving truck.
- Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities 9.2 mi This suburban arts center runs Colorado's third-largest theatre company.