Looking north along I-25 where I-225 splits off to the right. CDOT photo.

Roadgeeks like to name things.

Today we’re going to try to hang a name on something.

Usually, we like the technical names. We like to talk about “collector-distributor lanes,” the barrier-separated lanes that run alongside the through-lanes at freeway interchanges to allow exiting and entering traffic to merge and weave safely off the high-speed freeway. They’re used in the Narrows section of Interstate 25 between Washington Street and University Boulevard. My wife, Harriet, calls them “hunter-gatherer” lanes, perhaps a more picturesque description.

In that spirit, I’m proposing that we give a household name to the recently rebuilt and expanded interchange in the Denver Tech Center where Interstate 225 dumps into Interstate 25.

I want to call it the Full House. That’s the name that fellow roadgeek Duncan Shaw, a news producer at CBS4 Denver, proposed for it in 2001.

It works on two levels. One, if you were holding a poker hand with three twos and two fives, you’d have a full house. Two, the interchange handles more than 200,000 vehicles a day, making it one of the fullest places on the regional roadway system.

View Larger Map

We’ve got one of the unique names in the nation as far as interchanges go, with the Mousetrap at I-25 and Interstate 70 in the Globeville neighborhood. Technically, it’s a variation on what’s known as a Turbine Interchange, with sweeping circular ramps making the connections. Mind you, I don’t want to get into the middle of the debate over whether retired traffic reporter Don Martin or longtime Channel 7 television reporter Bill Clarke coined the Mousetrap term. But everyone knows it as the Mousetrap; they don’t say “You go north on I-25 and exit at I-70,” they say, “Take I-25 to the Mousetrap.”

So it’s time we stopped saying “Go down I-25 to that Semi-Directional T interchange at I-225 and head north.”

It’s time to play the Full House.

Headed from southbound I-225 to southbound I-25, under light rail bridges, in the Full House interchange. Photo by Ryan Wanner, of Ryan's Digital Roadgeekdom at http://r-dub.us/

Duncan says he threw out that name in 2001 during an online discussion on usenet.

“I first proposed the name ‘Full House’ for Denver’s I-25/I-225 interchange in the misc.transport.road newsgroup back in 2001 during a thread on interchange names where people were suggesting some for ones that didn’t have regularly-used names.

“I felt it was both a creative and unique name. You’ll find ‘spaghetti bowls’ and ‘mixmasters’ all over the country that could describe any number of interchanges. But I can only find 21 in the United States where both the same pattern exists as I-25/I-225 and the numbers could make up a legitimate full house hand.”

(Let’s pause here to appreciate the level of roadgeekery it takes to scour the nation’s highway system for all of the places where the potential exists to have two- and three-digit interstates meet that contain three of one number and two of another number.)

“For instance, I-10/I-110 would not count since there are no 1’s and 0’s in playing cards.”

Here is a link to a list of highway interchange nicknames from around the country.

And here is a link to a glossary and diagrams of various types of freeway interchanges.

The old interchange, before T-REX's extreme makeover highway edition, had hazardous left-lane access ramps.

The old Tech Center interchange had been build with a left-lane exit and entrance onto I-25 from I-225, which led to hazardous merging as traffic congestion grew over the years. Contractors Parsons Transportation Group and Kiewit, which teamed for the design-build project, redesigned this interchange while threading the light rail bridges through it as well.

In 2003, in my Lane Ranger column in the Rocky Mountain News, I solicited interchange names from readers, and Duncan’s name was, in my opinion, the best. I used it in my coverage whenever I could slip it past my editor. Matt Salek, a transportation engineer who maintains the Highways of Colorado web site with stats and data on every state highway, included the name on his site.

Duncan says that when he was a morning news producer at 9News working with traffic reporters Al Verlay and Tony LaMonica, he tried to dell them on the name as well, with little success.

But we can’t say that it caught on back then.

“At this point, I figure it will only be known – and remembered – by a limited number of people in the roadgeek community, and that’s fine with me,” Duncan said. “But it would have been nice to turn on the radio during rush hour, hear someone use the name I came up with during a traffic report, and know that drivers knew exactly where it was!”

So we already have the Mousetrap; Orange County, Calif., has the Orange Crush interchange; Chicago has the Hillside Strangler; Dallas has the High Five.

It’s time for people to start using the name Full House!

An RTD light rail train heads through the Full House interchange while highway traffic passes underneath.