Cedar Rapids Gazette: The Iowa Department of Transportation hopes to launch an express bus service between Cedar Rapids and Iowa City in 2018, a year before the Interstate 80/380 interchange replacement begins, an agency official said Tuesday. The hope is to relieve traffic and congestion during construction, which is slated from 2019 to 2023. “The bus service would begin one year before major traffic impacts,” Brent Paulsen, of the Iowa DOT office of public transit, said Tuesday night. This is a year later than originally proposed, but the upshot is that a funding source to make this happen has been identified. The express bus service would be subsidized as part of the $270 million budget of the five-year 80/380 interchange project.