Governor Owens will preside at a ceremony at I-25 and Downing Street in Denver on Tuesday, to celebrate the substantial completion of the road construction portion of the 5 year, $1.67 billion, 19 mile metropolitan Denver I-25/I-225 corridor project with the reopening of the exit ramp from I-25 to Downing Street (timed so that it happened after school was back in session for the Denver Public Schools).
Since Referendum D, which would have provided bonds for new transportation projects failed, even though Referendum C, which relaxed some TABOR restrictions on state spending passed, T-Rex will be followed mostly by pay as you go road construction projects, and by rail projects.T-Rex had both rail and road construction components. The light rail portion connects the existing Southewest line station at Broadway to the Denver Tech Center and Park Meadows Mall and beyond. It is scheduled to open on November 17, 2006.
Metropolitan Denver voters also passed the FasTracks program to expand Denver’s intracity passenger rail network to cover the entire metropolitan area. The first FasTracks project, a light rail line from Union Station in Denver’s Lower Downtown to Golden, mostly using an existing right of way, is expected to open in about seven years.
