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.

Where jetliners used to cross Interstate 70, Denver soon will be building a new $50.6 million interchange project that will reunite the south side of the old Stapleton airfield with the north side. But this time, it’s not 747s or DC-10s that will go over top of I-70 traffic, but Stapleton neighborhood residents, regional shoppers and other highway travelers.

When reconstructing one of Denver’s major business streets, Concrete Works of Colorado has found it helpful to its client — the city and the taxpayer — as well as the merchants along the South Broadway to move in like a colony of ants and get major pieces done in a day. Inside Lane observed one such day.

RTD is holding two public hearings in the coming weeks on the FasTracks Gold Line Final Environmental Impact Statement, and anticipates getting federal approval for the project in the fall.

The Gold Line is an 11.2-mile heavy-rail commuter corridor that connect Denver Union Station with Wheat Ridge at Ward Road, while preserving a future extension corridor from there into Golden.

The Gold Line has been packaged into a single initiative called Eagle P3, a planned Public-Private Partnership, with the East Corridor commuter rail project to Denver International Airport and construction of a rail yard and maintenance facility for all four FasTracks commuter rail corridors.

If successful, a consortium of designers, contractors, transit operators and financiers will take over the two corridors and other associated work, finance it privately, design it and build it, and then operate it for at least 40 years, under a contract with RTD.

The upside for RTD is that, by converting projects it would have to pay entirely upfront through borrowing and grants into a long-term concession contract for which it would make annual payments to the operators, it could build some financial breathing room into the beleaguered FasTracks plan of finance.

Denver has installed 10 sets of flashing school zone warning lights in time for the opening of school on Wednesday, with another 21 sets scheduled to be completed by the end of this year. The flashing beacons – two yellow flashers mounted above and below a lowered speed limit notification – are considered a more active reminder of the lowered limits during school hours than the static signs that list what hours of the day the lower limit is enforced. The lights flash during school hours when children are typically coming and going. Generally, traffic fines are doubled in school zones.

It’s a lesson based on Ben Franklin’s maxim that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Denver’s Sixth Avenue Viaduct got a facelift for its 50th birthday. Replacing support piers and bearings under the westbound bridge and rehabbing the concrete decking atop the eastbound structure for a total cost of $6 million will spare taxpayers the $30 million cost of replacing them 10 years from now.