The good news is there's a lot of work taking place on I-25 north of Denver.

Just don't try to get there from Denver during rush hour.

While projects are ongoing or contracted for I-25 from Colorado 7 to Colorado 66, there doesn't appear to be any money to address the real bottleneck, from U.S. 36 to 120 th Street until 2025.

"We're in a world of hurt, and I don't see any sunrise," said RTD Director Noel Busck, a former mayor of Thornton. "There won't be any money to widen that section until 2025 and it probably won't be completed until 2035.

"The public is frustrated in the north metro area with this congestion. ... That's a hell of a long way off for people to have any hope at all."

Of course, it's no secret that this section of highway is as bad as it gets in the metro area - one area to be avoided at all costs during rush hour.

"In terms of traffic volume it isn't the biggest," said CDOT spokeswoman Mindy Crane. "But with T-Rex complete that's where you see the most congestion."

Busck said that FasTracks and other commuter plans in the planning hopper would do little to ease the congestion, given the present circumstance and the amount of growth projected for the North Metro area. He said the I-25 bottleneck is way behind in securing funding than others areas with less congestion, such as U.S. 36.

Crane said that money has been slated for extending bridges that would accommodate an I-25 widening through the bottleneck. An EIS is also underway that addresses widening the highway all the way from Denver to Wellington that might include more general-purpose lanes, high-occupancy lanes, bus transit and commuter rail.

Meanwhile, from 120 th Street north to Colorado 66, highway improvements are progressing, Crane said. The highway has already been widened to three lanes in each direction to Colorado 7.

A $36 million project to widen to three lanes from Colorado 7 to Colorado 119 should be completed in December of 2008. A $49 million project that would widen to three lanes between Colorado 119 and Colorado 66 was recently let to Interstate Highway Construction of Englewood.

Busck said that I-25 is the only worry in Adams County, which is one of Colorado's more organized counties in terms of addressing transportation. County commissioners regularly get together with all the municipalities, CDOT officials and RTD directors and establish a short list of priorities.

"I believe we are the only entity to do that," he said. "And we've been doing that for at least five years."

Still Busck said that list isn't attracting any money for top projects such as widening 104 th Street to Colorado 85 - a principal airport route for the county.

"This state is unbelievable when it comes to funding transportation," he said, noting that Adams County always seemed to get the short end of the stick from the Owens administration. Part of that, Busck said, was that Adams County has a history of not voting for transportation issues - for instance, it was the only county in the metro area to vote against FasTracks.

"We (the voters) need to be supportive on transportation," he said. "It's terrible what we're doing to ourselves. We need to get, politically, on the map."