Colorado Springs - how the food gets here
A billion calories a day arrive by truck, and 82% of the semis use one road.
Every road on this map is drawn from CDOT and OpenStreetMap survey geometry, and every corridor is drawn at a width set by the number of tractor-trailers that actually crossed it in 2024. The Rampart Range walls off the west. The plains east are grain and cattle, not groceries. What is left is Interstate 25 - a single north–south seam between the mountains and the prairie, carrying the food supply of three-quarters of a million people.
El Paso County freight network
Line width = combination trucks per day, CDOT 2024. Tap a road.
Seven ways in, and one that matters
These are every state-highway crossing of the county perimeter, ranked by tractor-trailers per day. I-25's two gates carry 7,100 of the 8,690 that cross the line - 82% of the region's heavy freight moves through a corridor you could block in two places.
Where a billion calories actually comes from
Working from population to pounds to pallets. Figures in wheat are measured; figures in blue are derived from national per-capita averages applied to local population, and should be read as order-of-magnitude.
Blue values are estimates. There is no meter on the food supply - nobody counts
calories across a county line - so these apply USDA national per-capita food availability to Census population.
They are good to within a factor that matters for planning, not for accounting.
What breaks it
Fragility here is not about scarcity. It is about topology: one corridor, one weather regime, no storage, no second mode.
How this was built
Everything on the map is traceable. If a number is inferred rather than counted, it is marked.