In case you missed it | Hippie haven

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Hippie haven

As you may have heard, some real estate website called Estately recently ranked Boulder fourth on its list of the 17 best cities in the country for hippies.

But they didn’t really do their homework. Apparently one of the driving factors in the high ranking was the 4/20 pot smokefest on the University of Colorado campus, which CU officials have done their best to snuff out the past two years. Estately.com acknowledges that the gathering happens “almost every year,” an apparent nod to the campus closures in recent years, but it says the event features between 8,000 and 15,000 people. Not any more it don’t, thanks to the heavy-handed gestapos running CU.

The Estately blurb on Boulder declares that while the city has “reinvented itself as an affluent outdoorsy town,” it is “still very rooted in its hippie traditions,” like public nudity.

Well, there’s another strike, folks, since things like naked pumpkin runs and bike rides have fizzled.

Our favorite line from their description of our weed-infested city? “The local bread may be gluten-free, but practically the whole damn town is baked.”

We wish more of our hippie roots had survived our reinvention as an “affluent outdoorsy town.” Keep Boulder weird, people.

Time for tolls

So there has been much ballyhooing this week about the idea of toll lanes on I-70. Better get over it, folks, it’s coming, and it’s long overdue.

If you’re like us, the constipation of I-70 has sometimes been a real deterrent to weekend trips to the mountains, or has at least prompted more back-road adventures to avoid the mess.

The mountain communities and power brokers in Denver like the Colorado Department of Transportation have been hemming and hawing and wringing their hands about what to do with the parking lot on I-70 for literally decades. Countless committees, task forces, boards, commissions and working groups have studied the issue to death. In the mid-1990s, there was talk of building a high-tech, spaceage monorail that would have traveled over Loveland Pass, having already earned its extreme-weather stripes in the Alps. Speculation has been that the long-debated plans for a high-speed train of some sort was opposed by those who benefit financially from the current arrangement built on the shoulders of the asphalt, oil and gas industries.

Enough talk already. Let’s get on with uncorking that stoppage, and the only feasible way in the current corporate/political environment seems to be building reversible toll lanes that can be westbound on Saturday mornings and eastbound on Sunday afternoons. And it just makes sense to have those who use the highway pay for the improvements.

Unfortunately, it seems the best we can do in the alternative transportation department is throw in some buses.

Sad. But let’s get on with it.

Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com