Eight new artificial intelligence-enabled traffic counters set up across Pitkin County will soon provide officials with a more detailed picture of traffic flows in the upper valley.
“It’s very exciting because it’s going to increase the information that we have on congestion, traffic movements, travel, different types of travel and different types of congestion,” said Linda DuPriest, director of the Elected Officials Transportation Committee (EOTC). “We’re going to have a lot more detail and information than we’ve ever had.”
The eight permanent counters, provided by Rekor, a Maryland-based company specializing in roadway AI technology, are, for the most part, solar-powered and installed across Pitkin County at multiple points along Highway 82 and on other roads used by commuters. These new counters — a project led and funded by the EOTC, which is composed of Aspen, Snowmass Village and Pitkin County representatives — will collect additional data that provides an expanded view of where vehicles are moving and help identify the best mitigation strategies.
Each counter has a camera, operating 24/7, that captures both directions of traffic and an AI-processing unit that translates the video into data. This system is capable of counting the number of vehicles passing by and can distinguish vehicle types based on the Federal Highway Administration’s 13 vehicle category classifications, which differentiate passenger cars from heavier vehicles with more axles. The counters can provide an estimate of emissions based on the vehicle categories.
“We think of [Aspen and the whole valley] as being a tourism economy, but there’s actually a pretty sizable economy in construction and large home remodel,” DuPriest said.
Rekor came to the valley in 2023 and set up a camera near the Lumberyard site along Highway 82 to test how the counters would perform in Aspen’s climate. This proof of concept provided an early look at the type of information the counters could collect. It showed that about 30% to 40% of traffic consists of big pickup trucks and large-panel vans, which are hallmarks of the construction and service trades — otherwise known as the “trade parade.”
“So that’s really interesting because it might be difficult to see how we can get those guys to ride the bus, right?” DuPriest said.
The EOTC, in partnership with the county’s telecommunications department, is currently auditing the counters to verify that the recorded data is accurate, which includes ensuring the correct orientation of the camera and the clarity of the video. DuPriest said it’s unclear when the data gathered by the counter network will be deemed ready for public consumption or how it might be disseminated.
Where are the new counters?
The new counters will capture traffic on Brush Creek Road; Owl Creek Road; Highway 82 near the airport; McLain Flats Road; Castle Creek Bridge; Power Plant Road; Maroon Creek Road; and Highway 82 east of Aspen. This is an improvement from the only current permanent counter located between the Cemetery Lane light and the Castle Creek Bridge on Highway 82. This counter is owned by the city and uses a more traditional method of embedding counter tubes into the asphalt.
Initially, the project included five counters, DuPriest recalled, but feedback from the community and stakeholders led EOTC to add more counters expanding coverage at key locations. These include the entrance to Aspen near the Castle Creek Bridge; an alternate route bypassing the highway using Power Plant Road and McLain Flats; Maroon Creek Road where traffic heading to and from the public schools campus and Aspen Highlands can cause congestion; and near the North Star Nature Preserve to capture how much traffic is using Independence Pass in the summer.
“The data is just going to be better, there’s going to be more detail, there’s going to be more of it, and it’s going to tell us more about the different types of trips that people are taking. And then how you can solve for that, which is very complicated,” DuPriest said.
Credit: Curtis Wackerle/Aspen Journalism
Current counters offer contrasting views of traffic patterns
The existing Aspen counter at Cemetery Lane and Highway 82 shows a different trend from the Colorado Department of Transportation’s counter in Snowmass Canyon, located near Snowmass Creek Road — the other currently active permanent counter in Pitkin County.
The city’s counter, which is slowly failing and missed four months of data in 2024, including July and December, recorded an average of 20,000 vehicles passing by the counter every day in 2024. That’s up 3.4% from 2023, but it’s 15.2% lower than the 1993 levels of approximately 23,600, which was established as a threshold local leaders want to keep traffic under. The 2024 average is on par with 2021 and lower than prepandemic years.
Meanwhile, CDOT’s counter in Snowmass is seeing an annual daily average number of vehicles that keeps rising, reaching an average of 22,300 vehicles in 2024 — the highest level recorded since the counter was installed in 1993, when it counted a daily average of 12,400 vehicles. CDOT’s counter long recorded a lower car count than the city counter, but this changed for the first time in 2021, as Aspen Journalism reported in 2022.
This suggests that more people are using the Brush Creek Park and Ride to board a free Roaring Fork Transportation Authority bus for the final leg of their commute, and more cars are getting off the highway at Woody Creek to travel McLain Flats Road and Cemetery Lane, avoiding morning traffic backups that often begin at the airport. Cars that use Power Plant Road to cross Castle Creek miss the city’s traffic counter.
Some temporary counters have been set up over the years, but Aspen relies on a single permanent counter at the city’s entrance. “The current traffic counter is 20-plus years old and has been slowly failing on us,” Carly McGowan, senior project manager for the City Transportation Department, wrote to Aspen Journalism.
Credit: Curtis Wackerle/Aspen Journalism
A three-year project in the making
“It’s been a long time coming,” Aspen Mayor Torre said of the new counters at an EOTC meeting in October.
In 2022, EOTC put out a request for proposals for the project but didn’t receive any bids. The county telecommunications department came on board to help, and an analyst from the county’s engineering department started looking into what technology would work best. They reviewed several companies before choosing Rekor, which set up the proof of concept at the Lumberyard in 2023. Then, officials had to choose the locations of the counters, deal with property lines, rights-of-way and permits, and figure out the orientation of each counter so that the sun would hit the panel and so that the cameras would see the road. “That took a lot longer than we could have imagined because we just had never done this before,” DuPriest said.
The equipment cost about $260,000. There will be no operating costs for the first three years as part of the contract with the provider, but after that, the EOTC will pay $38,500 per year for the system.
These counters are part of the Aspen traffic conversation that has been going on for more than 40 years. On March 4, Aspen voters weighed in on the entrance of Aspen for the first time in years. They narrowly approved a referendum granting CDOT the right to use city-owned open space to build a new highway alignment at the town’s entrance identified as the preferred alternative in a 1998 record of decision, or in a future amended record of decision. In the same election, Aspenites also rejected a referendum that would have raised the threshold for voter approval to change the use of open space from a simple majority to 60%.
The data from the new counters is expected to be part of the upcoming Comprehensive Travel Data Report scheduled to be released later this year.
“It’s going to really make all the debate and conversations and strategizing around traffic clearer because we’re just going to know more,” DuPriest said.
