One of the Denver metro area's most congested and crash-prone interchanges is finally getting torn down and rebuilt from scratch. Lakewood, Colorado has secured a $20 million federal RAISE grant to fully reconstruct the interchange where US-6 (West 6th Avenue) meets Wadsworth Boulevard, replacing a cloverleaf-era design that has frustrated commuters and safety advocates for decades.
The interchange sits at one of the western Denver suburbs' most critical crossroads: US-6 is a major east-west corridor connecting Lakewood and neighboring communities to downtown Denver, while Wadsworth Boulevard is the primary north-south artery running through Jefferson County. The existing interchange was built for a different era, with substandard merge distances, outdated ramp geometry, and virtually no accommodation for pedestrians, cyclists, or transit riders. In a region that has grown by hundreds of thousands of people since the interchange was designed, the bottleneck has only worsened.
The rebuild won't just move more cars through faster. The project carries a multimodal designation, meaning pedestrian, bicycle, and transit infrastructure will be woven into the new design rather than treated as afterthoughts. That reflects Lakewood's broader push to reimagine the Wadsworth corridor as something more than a car-first throughway: the city has been pursuing bus rapid transit planning and mixed-use redevelopment along Wadsworth for years.
The funding comes through the federal RAISE program, a competitive grant initiative created under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that awards money to transportation projects with significant regional impact. Colorado's TABOR amendment, which tightly limits the state's ability to raise revenue, makes federal grants like this essential for major capital projects. The state has a well-documented infrastructure backlog, and CDOT has long listed the US-6/Wadsworth interchange among its most urgent reconstruction needs.
Full interchange reconstruction, as opposed to incremental patching, means the project will redesign the geometry of the interchange entirely. No construction timeline has been publicly specified in the grant documentation, but CDOT and the City of Lakewood will need to advance engineering and environmental review before ground can break. How quickly that process moves will determine when the region's commuters start seeing results.
