INSIGHTS | Jared Polis dreams of Vegas underground while building country roads

Gov. Jared Polis is an excellent follow on social media, but on the weekend he's especially entertaining, sharing his personal feelings and musing about state history and landmarks, as well as laying out hopes and dreams.

Speaking of dreaming, his mind was on the road last weekend. Whatever Elon Musk is selling, it appears Colorado is listening.

Polis is the innovation-minded governor who vowed to bring high-speed commuter rail to the Front Range, an environmentally friendly way to move people and lighten the burden and cost on our overburdened, underfunded interstates.

“I’m watching the implementation of the Las Vegas Tunnel project closely,” Polis wrote on Facebook on Saturday afternoon with a link to a CNN story.

RELATED: Is the Hyperloop in the blueprint for Colorado's transportation future?

The billionaire innovator's narrow, high-speed commercial tunnel beneath Sin City could be operational in 2020.

“We’re going to need an innovative solution to reduce traffic here in Colorado, whether for our daily commute or for I-70 to the mountains. I don’t want us to risk being the very first to try an experimental technology, but if we can be 2nd or 3rd, we can benefit early on and help lead the way with new cost-effective technologies to reduce traffic,” Polis wrote.

CNN said Musk is looking to bore tunnels under congested cities across the country and mentioned Chicago and Baltimore.

Who knows if Musk, the car builder and rocket man, is serious about solving traffic jams, too.

See, I knew some guys in Alabama who broke even on a toll bridge and got rich off real estate that became a shorter drive to Orange Beach. This is like that.

Tunnels in the U.S. are massively expensive and slow to get permitted and constructed.

The LA Times reported that Musk (by proxy, Polis) envisions a traffic future where a self-driving electric car pulls onto an elevator embedded in a street, then sinks below the ground and zips paying commuters beneath the old traffic at 150 mph, virtually eliminating the need for fossil fuel and drastically curbing accidents.

If Musk can find a path to speed past government regulators in places desperate for traffic solutions, however, he stands to make a fortune in the boring game alone. If the autonomous, electric, fast-moving travel catches on, particularly broaching long-distance travel, he has revolutionized the way we travel.

Musk is selling a lot more than holes in the ground.

He's certainly wasting no time, something the government could learn from.

It was just the week before Christmas 2018 when Musk rolled out his 1.1-mile prototype tunnel. It cost him $10 million to build under the streets of Hawthorne, California, near Musk's SpaceX interstellar endeavor. That's a fraction of what a typical mile of traffic tunneling costs.

The Las Vegas Convention Center tunnel is expected to turn a 15-minute walk into a 1-minute ride for a price tag of nearly $49 million. If anybody would take that gamble, it's no surprise it's overcrowded, go-for-broke Vegas.

The Polis post, then, sounds like an invitation to Musk, whose most notable Colorado foray to date is palling around with former Gov. John Hickenlooper, our possible future U.S. senator.

On Sunday Polis followed up the tunnel talk with a Forbes article about the first zero-emission hydrogen-powered commuter rail expected to launch in Southern California in 2024.

"The first train, with two cars and a rooftop power pack containing fuel cells and hydrogen tanks, will run on a nine-mile commuter rail line between San Bernardino and Redlands," Polis wrote on Facebook.

Polis, however, must chew gum and dream big at the same time. 

Before Christmas I enjoyed breakfast with Shoshana Lew, the state highway director. 

From my view out CDOT's windshield, I say don’t expect bombshells bursting in air when Polis releases his long-awaited long-term transportation plan this spring. It’s the next turn of the screw after Coloradans told the administration in a listening tour across the state last summer and fall.

RELATED: Governor's office releases first phase of transportation system overhaul

“Mostly it's this combination of smaller investments,” Lew said of the immediate future. “A lot of it is going to rural areas, which is nice for us to see — stops for buses to stop at, maintenance facilities to make sure these smaller communities who have a small bus service have a place to take care of it. Some of it will likely be going to the main streets that are also CDOT roads and making sure that those are places where people can walk or bike.”

Interstate 25 remains a priority, she said.

“It just needs it so bad,” Lew said.

That makes sense, since there’s absolutely no way to pay for a train right now. 

Walking before you run is a normal progression, especially when your pockets are full of lint.

Lew said Polis is "extraordinarily supportive" of investing in transportation in rural communities.

There's a risk in overpromising and under-delivering. When you keep people focused on a distant horizon, they will constantly trip over what's under their feet, always waiting on a distant solution.

We were told as children there would be flying cars by now. A new bike lane in Eads is a big disappointment if you're waiting on your flying car.