Save the last dance for me! Denver, the city that popularized the pedestrian-friendly all-walk diagonal-crossing Barnes Dance, is considering phasing it out of the busy downtown grid as part of a larger evaluation of signal timing within the central business district.

With warmer weather to help it along, construction progress on the West Corridor light rail project is ramping up.
The work may be most visible along the Sixth Avenue Freeway, where a dramatic steel arch bridge will be rolled out over the roadway during a full weekend closure in two weeks and a long curving bridge is winding its way over the Indiana Street interchange. Denver Transit Construction Group and its major subcontractors have almost all of the bridge structures underway. Click here to see a slide show and read an RTD report on construction progress.

More than $390 million in road construction projects on state highways will be underway this year in the metro Denver area, with more than a third of the total funded by the federal stimulus program.

Denver International Airport can become a global hub, its manager Kim Day says, because the people who planned it made sure it had plenty of room to grow at lower cost than its competitors. DIA already is the 10th busiest airport in the world but its international service is lagging. Day outlined five factors she believes will contribute to the emergence of DIA as a global hub.

The dirt is starting to move in the $40.1 million design-build reconstruction of four miles along Hampden Avenue, starting at the east end of the corridor with replacement of the bridge over Federal Boulevard. Inside Lane takes you on a tour of the job with this video featuring the project managers, plus a slide show.

The FasTracks Northwest Rail corridor could get a head start under a plan that would build its first six and a half miles, between Denver Union Station and south Westminster at 72nd and Lowell Boulevard, as part of the construction of lines to the airport and Arvada. That will give RTD the capability of initiating rail transit service to southwest Adams County and Westminster sooner rather than later.

RTD’s pay-to-park program isn’t paying. The program that charges out-of-district transit riders to use high-demand park-n-Ride lots has brought in only 33 percent of its expected revenue, while costing only 54 percent of its original expenses.

FasTracks construction of the new Sheridan Boulevard bridge is on schedule – good news for drivers through the two-lane work zone – and the structure may get its first girders next week. View a video of the work here and click on the story for an additional slide show.

Denver International Airport turned 15 years old over the weekend. A milestone for sure for a facility that had a difficult time in development and construction, and that many critics even predicted would never open or go belly-up financially within 18 months. But what was on the news about it? Cupcakes.

If Sen. Jim Bunning had not balked at the end of his far-from-perfect game on the floor of the U.S. Senate, the Colorado Department of Transportation and the team of contractors out in the field on numerous federal-aid highway projects stood to lose an average of $1.76 million in reimbursement per workday.