In the midst of nationwide budget reductions that are causing cuts to public school bus routes, there is a program in the Denver metro area that can help. The Denver Regional Council of Governments offers Schoolpool, a free carpool matching service for parents with children in elementary and secondary schools.

“Schoolpool is a wonderful alternative to driving your child to and from school every day, or having your child walk in congested and busy traffic areas,” says Mia Bemelen of DRCOG RideArrangers. “More than 12,000 elementary and secondary school families in the Denver/Boulder metropolitan area are enrolled in the program and we are ready to help parents across the region.”

View Metro Denver’s Freeway Bottlenecks in a larger map

Denver’s most notorious freeway bottlenecks are in the crosshairs of transportation planners.

But without reliable and consistent funding as ammunition to build the improvements that would untangle these congestion points, they’ll be shooting blanks.

You know them by name, likely. They tie up traffic regularly and frustratingly. Interstate 70 at Floyd Hill. Sixth Avenue at Bryant Street. Interstate 70 through the Stapleton area. Boulder Turnpike from Foothills to Davidson Mesa. Interstate 25 at Broadway and Santa Fe. And the mother of traffic bottlenecks, I-25 in the Central Valley between Speer and 20th Street – the most heavily traveled segment of roadway in the Rocky Mountain West.

A new review of the FasTracks financial plan says RTD is too optimistic in estimating the revenue it will collect over several decades to pay for the $7 billion transit expansion, the Denver Post reports. “There is still substantial uncertainty in all the key elements of the FasTracks revenue stream,” the Denver Regional Council of Governments said in its latest analysis of the massive Regional Transportation District project.

Stick around for the next 25 years and you might be in for a big surprise at the different ways you will be able to travel around metro Denver. And if it happens, the bigger surprise will be how we found a way to pay for it. Uncounted billions of dollars in transportation projects are on the drawing boards and in the imaginations of thousands of people who, over the course of years, have helped shape a vision of the region’s future transportation network