A lobbying effort is underway to remove Interstate 70 from Denver entirely to make way for the rebirth of a depressed part of the city cut in half by the highway for decades. Activists and others championing the rerouting of I-70 say a recent proposal by the Colorado Department of Transportation to drop the highway below ground level between Brighton and Colorado boulevards is not bold enough to save the Elyria and Swansea neighborhoods. “CDOT is really good at laying concrete,” said Thaddeus Tecza, a senior instructor emeritus of political science at the University of Colorado. “These guys are engineers, and their answer to everything is to put down a lane of concrete. What they are not really good at is planning for a community.