Idaho 55 traffic is worse than ever. Everyone struggles with how to handle it
Tori Doell, 64, calls Garden Valley her “happy place.” Ever since she was a college student, she has driven there from Boise — pretty much any weekend she could.
Doell said she could always count on the area’s natural beauty to melt away the week’s worries.
But lately, for the first time in 44 years, Doell has been rethinking her weekend pilgrimages. The stress of driving Idaho 55 has grown too much for her.
“It used to be a fun, beautiful drive,” Doell told the Idaho Statesman. “You’d be able to look around and see the colors in the fall. Even if there was snow on the roads, everybody would drive decent. Now, it’s like a suicide mission.”
Idaho 55 between Eagle and McCall serves as the gateway to places like Payette Lake, Tamarack Resort, Cascade, natural hot springs and other outdoor playgrounds. Running through the far western part of Boise County, it also serves as the main roadway connecting communities like Horseshoe Bend and Banks to the Boise area.
Drivers like Doell aren’t imagining the transformation. Data show that Idaho 55, between Eagle and McCall, has seen a significant increase in traffic in recent years, resulting in bumper-to-bumper vehicles on many weekends. And if there is an accident on the narrow, mostly two-lane road, drivers can be trapped for hours.
Numbers show rapid increase in Idaho 55 traffic
Jason Brinkman, an Idaho Transportation Department district engineer, said the increase in traffic has tracked closely with the Treasure Valley’s population growth. But, by all accounts, the COVID-19 pandemic marked a turning point.
Starting around 2014, the amount of money McCall brought in through hotel taxes began to increase steadily, by about 5% to 7% each year. Then the pandemic hit, and hotel tax revenue shot up by 46% in 2020. The numbers have never gone back down, according to the McCall Chamber of Commerce.
The Idaho Transportation Department uses automatic traffic counters along the highway to calculate the average number of vehicles each day. The counter north of Banks recorded 6,251 vehicles per day in July 2010 and 8,186 in July 2024. The number of vehicles on Idaho 55 near West Dry Creek Road, north of Eagle, nearly doubled in a span of 15 years — from 10,447 in July 2010 to 20,731 in July 2025.
During the summer of 2025, the transportation department saw “close to the most number of cars that you can fit through a given segment of the road in a given time period” on Idaho 55, Brinkman said.
Experts calculate that between 1,100 and 1,200 cars per hour in each direction is the maximum for many areas of the highway, including a segment just south of Banks. That spot reached a high of 1,180 cars during peak hours of holiday weekends, according to ITD.
“This year, really for the first time, we’re getting pretty close to what we consider to be capacity on the road on certain days and for certain hours,” Brinkman said.
The McCall area used to have quieter times of the year, when the town would return to the locals. Tourism would wane when the weather was too cold to recreate on Payette Lake, yet there wasn’t enough snow for skiing.
Those “shoulder seasons” in the spring and fall have all but disappeared, according to McKenzie Kraemer, marketing director at the McCall Chamber of Commerce. Visitor numbers now remain high regardless of the time of year.
The number of tourists in the McCall area also has increased through the week, Kraemer said, but weekends remain the worst for travel.
“We don’t drive on the weekends,” Kraemer said. “I would never go to Boise on a Sunday from McCall. If I did, I would take (U.S.) 95. Those peak weekends, on a Sunday afternoon, it’s taking people three and a half to four hours to get to Boise. That is insane.”
Emergency responders struggle with more accidents
More cars inevitably mean more accidents. And those who work in emergency response in rural Boise County have found that demand difficult to keep up with, according to four separate emergency response sources who spoke to the Statesman.
Boise County Sheriff Scott Turner said his dispatch went from receiving about 3,500 calls per year in 2020 to more than 10,000 in 2024. That rapid increase in emergency service requests has stretched his agency to its limits, he said. The department has just nine patrol deputies who respond to all emergencies for the entire county, according to Turner. The Boise County Sheriff’s Office is in Idaho City, on Idaho 21.
High traffic makes it difficult for ambulances, fire trucks and law enforcement vehicles to reach the scene of an accident.
“A lot of the time, those responses are delayed because of the sheer volume of traffic,” Turner said.
When they do reach the scene, officials sometimes have to shut down the entire road, leaving people stranded in their vehicles for hours. The Sheriff’s Office closed Idaho 55 for 12 hours this past Sunday after a fatal crash in which a truck went into the Payette River.
“The purpose of shutting down the highway is not to be inconvenient to motorists,” Turner said. “It’s so we can safely get emergency responders in and out of the scene. Because of the volume of traffic on 55, if we try to intermix all that emergency vehicle traffic in with commuter traffic, we’re just creating an even more unsafe environment.”
Turner said the responses for Idaho 55 accidents take up the bulk of local emergency resources, leading to waits for Boise County residents.
“Because my staff is tied up with crashes, reckless drivers and things on the highway, the calls for service to the citizens who actually live in Boise County are taking longer to get to,” Turner said. “There are days on a weekend where calls will sit on the board for six, seven hours because we’re working traffic accidents back-to-back-to-back on Highway 55.”
Many Boise County residents rely almost entirely on unpaid volunteer firefighters, EMTs and ambulance drivers.
Andrew Bourret has a home and timber business in Garden Valley, as well as a cabin in Placerville. He serves as the volunteer fire chief of Placerville and has become concerned with the dwindling number of volunteers across Boise County’s 10 fire departments.
“How do you motivate a volunteer? I always tell my firefighters we’re here for our family, our friends, our neighbors and strangers in need,” Bourret said. “That’s an easy sell for me (in Placerville), because there aren’t that many people traveling the roads up here. But with Highway 55, in Horseshoe Bend and Garden Valley, the predominance of their calls for emergencies are people who are passing by.”
Because the volunteers in these positions aren’t paid, they aren’t required to respond to emergencies.
“The lack of volunteers means sometimes you might get only two guys, sometimes you might get 10 guys from the fire department,” Turner said.
Idaho Transportation Department says don’t expect big changes
Those hoping that state officials can somehow swoop in to alleviate Idaho 55’s traffic problem will likely be disappointed. The Idaho Transportation Department is working on “minor to moderate” improvements of the roadway, not major ones, according to Brinkman.
Those improvements include the addition of passing lanes, turn lanes, wider shoulders, intersection updates and messaging boards. Plans also involve installing an underpass near Avimor, widening the area near Smiths Ferry and adding a digital messaging board south of Cascade to warn drivers of delays before they lose cellphone service.
Brinkman pointed to the addition of a traffic signal at the Banks to Lowman road intersection with 55 as a project that has helped some traffic issues.
But traffic experts say Idahoans simply have to learn to accept the realities of living in a place undergoing a population boom. They hope to help motorists understand what to expect by using messaging and online tracking systems to communicate information on accidents, delays, available alternate routes and travel times.
“We can’t widen the road to four lanes from State Street in Boise all the way to McCall,” said Vincent Trimboli, Idaho Transportation Department District Three deputy administrator. “But we can make improvements to the road that improve the safety of the corridor, like adding signs so people actually know what they’re driving into, which decreases driver frustration.
“It gives them confidence knowing: ‘OK, well, I can’t get through there. Now I’m gonna go back and go do another recreation opportunity.’”
Brinkman said people often ask about turning Idaho 55 into a four-lane road, but doing so would not only be “prohibitively expensive,” but would also “disrupt the character of the route.”
The Federal Highway Administration has designated Idaho 55 between Eagle and New Meadows as a National Scenic Byway. The federal website touts the Payette River Scenic Byway’s stunning wilderness, noting the way it “meanders through foothills, mountain valleys, canyons, forests, and wide-open valleys with expansive vistas.”
Brinkman said adding concrete walls, bridges and more lanes would ruin that natural beauty. It also would involve destroying canyons, mountainsides and waterways.
“A lot of the draw of this area is that scenic beauty,” Brinkman said. “There’s campgrounds, rafting and kayaking, sightseeing, berry picking, all sorts of things along the route that would be largely disrupted by building something like that.”
In the end, the very reason that so many people are drawn to travel on Idaho 55 is the same reason there are no simple solutions to creating a faster, smoother route.
Hopefully, the destination is still worth it.
“The area has changed and gotten so big, but you come around the corner as you cross the bridge, and it’s like, ‘Ahhh,’ ” Doell said, letting out a deep breath and remembering the feeling of heading into Garden Valley. “It’s calm. Without the stress of the road, the stress of the (Treasure) Valley. Sitting by the river, it’s just the sound of the water and the osprey hunting.”
This story was originally published September 26, 2025 at 4:00 AM.
