Just after noon, the taillights ahead warn of another sudden midday slowdown. It’s not even rush hour — it’s just a typical weekday on Peña Boulevard.
Congestion now builds at more times of the day as Peña, the original access road to Denver International Airport, struggles to keep up with two engines of growth: the airport itself, which is charting record passenger traffic, and the once-sparsely populated plains along Peña that have seen an explosion of housing and jobs over the nearly three decades since DIA opened.
But as DIA and city leaders work out plans for a likely road expansion later this decade, what seems to some nearby residents like a measured fix has sparked fierce debate, not least because more capacity usually means more tailpipe emissions.
What to do about Peña also has raised unique questions — over how to serve both DIA passengers and local commuters, the difficulty of improving transit connection gaps in the largely suburban neighborhoods nearby in Denver and Aurora, and, most of all, whether an investment in the parallel A-Line train could take more strain off the freeway.
This week a metro Denver planning organization is poised to join with DIA to commit the first $18.5 million toward the planning and design of a potential $277 million expansion project. The project would widen the first six miles of Peña, where the freeway still has two lanes in each direction. The still-evolving plans call for a “managed lane” between Interstate 70 and E-470, likely in the form of a toll lane or a transit-only lane, along with safety upgrades for the existing roadway.
With construction at least four years away, DIA, which likely would pay for most of the costs, will sort through the options in a Peña Boulevard master plan that’s due by early next year. Some of that initial project money also is earmarked for the development of strategies to increase the use of transit and other alternatives to driving.
Talk to local officials, and road improvements seem inevitable.
“I don’t see how we address both the residential and the economic needs of Montbello and Green Valley Ranch — and also regional needs — without widening it one additional lane,” said Denver City Councilwoman Stacie Gilmore, who represents those far-northeast neighborhoods on either side of Peña.
But freeway widening would amount to “climate arson,” in the charged words of a group called the Denver Bicycle Lobby.
Last week it sent a petition with 294 signatures to new Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, asking him to withdraw the city’s request to the Denver Regional Council of Governments for $5 million in federal money for Peña Boulevard and redirect it to design work for a Broadway bike lane extension.
That money, part of a regional package of project selections for the next four years that’s up for a final vote by DRCOG’s board Wednesday, is set to go toward the initial $18.5 million in Peña planning costs.
Johnston has staked out a cautious position on Peña, saying during the mayoral campaign that highway expansions shouldn’t be the city’s primary strategy to address traffic and that he would work to expand transit options. Spokeswoman Jordan Fuja told The Denver Post that the mayor, who took office last month, “is waiting to assess the study results” from DIA’s master plan.
Transit advocates and urbanists see an obvious alternative in the A-Line, which has become a popular way to reach DIA since it opened in 2016. It connects the airport to downtown Denver’s Union Station 23 miles away.
“If you look at it from the perspective of the status quo, it will always feel like the right thing to do is to widen the road,” said Brent Toderian, a city planning consultant based in Vancouver, Canada. But he characterizes highway expansions as giving car addicts “another hit.”
After speaking recently at the Denver South Suburban Mobility Summit in Lone Tree, Toderian said about Peña: “Know that going in, you’re not going to reduce congestion. You will increase (greenhouse gas) emissions. It’s great for the car industry. It’s great for the sprawl industry.”
The smarter — if more difficult — approach, he said, is investing money to make public transit more useful and convenient for more people.
Greater Denver Transit, a rider advocacy group, is working to launch a campaign to push DIA and local leaders toward supporting transit options.
Nine percent of passengers use public transit to get to and from the airport, according to DIA surveys, and the share among airport employees is 17% — with the vast majority of each group taking the A-Line. It potentially could carry many more travelers, advocates argue.
But improving the trains’ current 15-minute daytime frequency would require costly track work to fill in at least one of the two sections closer to DIA where just a single track was built, requiring trains going in either direction to share.
Critics of the train alternative point out that the A-Line just isn’t a convenient option for many airport-bound travelers across metro Denver. Among them is Denver City Councilman Kevin Flynn, who previously managed project communication during A-Line construction for the Regional Transportation District.
“We can’t afford to obstruct the ability of people all over our metro area to get to our airport,” said the southwest Denver resident. To him, that makes an expansion of Peña Boulevard the best choice. “The A-Line covers only a portion of it — and I say that as a big A-Line fan.”
More traffic is inevitable in fast-growing area
Whatever the solution, it’s clear that Peña is overloaded now — and more cars and trucks are coming.
DIA’s passenger traffic dipped during the pandemic but has since recovered, reaching 69.3 million last year. DIA said Thursday that this year, it’s on track to hit 78 million passengers or more, well ahead of projections that have the airport reaching 100 million within the next decade; a large part of its growth is coming from connecting passengers who don’t leave the airport.
Airport-related traffic once accounted for nearly all travel on Peña Boulevard, which was named in honor of former Mayor Federico Peña, who helped lay the groundwork to build the new airport. DIA traffic now makes up a 73% share, according to DIA traffic studies — with the subdivisions, apartments and employers in the area fueling a growing 27% local share.
Last year, DIA says the road averaged nearly 129,000 vehicles per day, up more than 70% from the airport’s first year in 1995 — though still down from a peak of 138,000 in 2019, before the pandemic.
The airport’s application for planning grant money for Peña cited regional growth projections that the number of households within five miles of the road will nearly double by 2050 — growing from 127,000 to 250,000 — while the number of jobs located in the same area grows by 68%, from 238,000 to 400,000. Roughly 30,000 jobs are now based at DIA.
That growth is happening quickly. While Denver’s Green Valley Ranch neighborhood is largely built out, construction crews are at work in several areas around it — from the transit-oriented Peña Station Next development near the A-Line’s 61st & Peña Station in Denver to Painted Prairie and Green Valley Ranch East, both subdivisions over the meandering city line in Aurora.
As of the 2020 census, 110,783 people lived in Denver, Aurora and Adams County census tracts in the area along I-70, Peña and to the east, according to a Post analysis. With winding streets, many of those tracts have much lower population densities than more central Denver neighborhoods, though some developments incorporate townhomes and apartments.
One attraction is clear from signs advertising the new homes along East 56th Avenue: New houses start in the $400,000 range, and some condos are advertised in the upper-$300,000 range — both substantially more affordable than metro Denver’s median home prices, which stood at $650,000 for a single-family home in July.
Gilmore, the Denver councilwoman, also notes that the neighborhoods there have a majority of Latino and Black residents, many of whom work in jobs that require vehicles.
She outlined quality-of-life concerns as drivers exit Peña and cut through neighborhoods. She has pushed for the city to pay for improvements to arterial roads, along with investing in the improved bus, pedestrian and bike routes called for by recent city plans for the area.
“Right now, every morning we have a mass exodus of folks in single-occupancy vehicles going to work and school — and then everybody comes back at five o’clock in the evening,” Gilmore said, with many of them taking Peña.
East of the E-470 tollway, Aurora has approved the massive 12,000-home Aurora Highlands community, with construction well underway. Aurora is tracking residential developments planned or under construction east of Peña and north of I-70 that total nearly 35,000 housing units, according to city data.
Employers have become a growing presence in the area, with industrial and warehouse development now spreading east of E-470 along East 64th Avenue. On the western end, near the massive Gaylord Rockies Resort and Convention Center, Pepsi is building a new plant on 72nd Avenue, while Swire Coca-Cola USA has leased land from DIA to the north for a facility. Both would replace older Denver plants.
And United Airlines this month bought 113 acres of undeveloped land along 64th Avenue, just east of Peña, to expand its pilot training capacity in Denver.
Gilmore worries about truck traffic from the two soda plants and has pressed the companies to agree to keep the expected 565 outbound trucks a day combined off local roads and on Peña.
Focus is on roads in Aurora and near DIA
Across the city boundary in Aurora, interim City Manager Jason Batchelor said transportation needs are key to its planning. The city, Adams County and developers formed the Aerotropolis Regional Transportation Authority to build out roads, new exits on E-470 and I-70, and other infrastructure, with initial projects totaling about $175 million.
Plans call for the building of Aerotropolis Parkway on the area’s eastern frontier — a major new thoroughfare connecting I-70 north to Peña Boulevard roughly in line with Powhaton Road and, near DIA, Jackson Gap Road. It would be the third major road route to DIA.
“We wanted to get people north and south without having to send people over to Peña or E-470,” Batchelor said.
DIA’s planners have faced criticism for taking a similar road-first approach for improving travel along the Peña corridor, despite its proximity to the A-Line.
“I think the city has for years been very clear in its goals of reducing vehicle use, reducing climate emissions, reducing ozone from traffic — and trying to encourage transit and bicycling,” said David Mintzer, a Denver physician who’s become a vocal advocate on transportation issues. “But when it comes to its actual investment, it plays a different game.”
East of E-470, where Peña Boulevard serves only airport-related locations, DIA has been widening the road on its own in recent years, starting with the inbound side heading toward the terminal.
DIA has completed about $41 million of $93 million in planned expansion and reconfiguration work along Peña and its exits since 2019, though some components were delayed during the pandemic. That construction is expected to resume next year on the westbound side.
When it comes to Peña improvements west of E-470, DIA says the Federal Aviation Administration has put limits on the airport’s ability to use its own money, which it generates from fees and airport revenue.
Generally, the contributions must be in line with the airport and local traffic shares — so DIA currently is able to cover 73% of project costs in that segment, Lisa Nguyen, the airport’s principal transportation planner, said. The rest would come from DRCOG, the regional planning organization, or from local government partners, who could seek state or federal grants.
So far, only the local contribution toward the $18.5 million in planning money has been worked out.
Mintzer was among those who cried foul early this year after DIA and the city sought the $5 million matching funds through DRCOG — at the same time it also was launching its Peña master plan to explore solutions.
To Mintzer and others, it sounded like the decision had already been made.
Nguyen said the master plan is helping the airport zero in on viable options to improve Peña. And even if a toll lane or high-occupancy-vehicle lane becomes the preferred option, she said, the federally required environmental review process in coming years will require thorough vetting of alternatives and extensive community feedback.
She noted that in DRCOG’s recent 2050 regional transportation plan, the recommendation for Peña on the I-70 to E-470 segment was changed from adding general lanes in the prior edition to managed lanes in the new one.
“This is a big step in the right direction,” Nguyen said of ruling out general-purpose lanes. “Regionally, we’ve got a lot of environmental goals that we can’t build ourselves out of. Induced demand (on roads) is not the answer — but at the same time, recognizing that transit service doesn’t necessarily serve everyone who needs to access the airport — what can we do to incentivize higher-occupancy vehicles?”
An HOV lane — or joint HOV and toll lane — could prioritize the many buses and shuttles that serve DIA passengers, she said, including those operated by RTD and private providers.
In the 2050 plan, the project is designated to happen in the 2030s, but it’s possible the project could begin sooner if it wins approval.
Besides the road work, the project, as outlined now, also would add new multi-use trails near the highway, primarily for cyclists to use for travel between new developments, existing trails and A-Line stations. The airport also is creating a transportation demand management plan and will use $1.2 million of the initial planning money to implement it — likely by starting new programs or promoting options that reduce solo driving or transit use.
Denver’s transportation department is conducting a related study that zeroes in on travel within the neighborhoods near Peña. Both it and DIA this weekend planned to begin soliciting input for their studies by visiting community events in Montbello and Green Valley Ranch. DIA also began offering an online “virtual open house” starting Monday; it will be available until Sept. 7.
Pressure to elevate transit’s role
Mintzer said he’d like to see Denver’s mayor and City Council “step up and redirect” DIA to focus on supporting transit expansion instead of a road project. As it stands, DIA’s planners draw the line at finding ways to encourage passengers and employees to use existing transit services — leaving any service improvements to RTD, which faces its own long-term financial difficulties and labor shortages.
The Johnston administration also is facing pressure from its own Denver International Airport transition committee to elevate the role of transit in DIA’s planning for Peña Boulevard. Civic and business leaders, along with airport veterans, sat on the committee, which was chaired by former Mayor Peña.
The transition committee’s report, released last week, says DIA should pursue both road and transit options.
It recommends completing the roadway expansion study. And it urges DIA and the city to “partner with RTD to make RTD travel options the main modes of travel to DEN, including increasing the frequency of trains and buses and expanding times that they run as well.”
Doing so for the A-Line isn’t as simple as buying more train cars, though those can cost millions of dollars each. Running trains more frequently than the current peak of every 15 minutes also would require overcoming a limitation from the A-Line’s construction — the single-tracking of about five miles across two segments, one crossing I-70 and the other north of the 61st & Peña Station.
That was done by RTD’s private partner, Denver Transit Partners, to save money at a time when RTD couldn’t afford its original plan under the voter-approved FasTracks initiative. But the project did build bridges wide enough to accommodate two tracks in the 3.5-mile northern section, likely making double-tracking there easier than in the south section.
The A-Line project also left out a potential station at 72nd Avenue and Himalaya Street, north of the Gaylord hotel in the same section — an area that DIA markets as a transit-oriented development opportunity if it’s ever built. Adding the station also would require double-tracking that 3.5-mile section.
RTD officials and people who worked on the A-Line project, along with transit advocates, confirmed that double-tracking at least one of those segments would be costly, especially with high inflation in construction costs. RTD hasn’t produced any recent estimates, but the cost likely would be $100 million-plus for the northern section, said Richard Bamber, a co-founder of the Greater Denver Transit group and a civil engineer who worked on RTD FasTracks projects.
RTD cites other challenges to running more frequent trains, including congestion on tracks near Union Station, and higher ongoing maintenance costs.
But Bamber suggests those are solvable challenges. He and James Flattum, the group’s other co-founder, also argue DIA has a good case to make to the FAA that it should be allowed to invest in further transit upgrades near the airport.
Flynn, the councilman who worked for RTD at the time, said the first capacity expansion option for the A-Line was intended to be the extension of all station platforms — except at Union Station and DIA — to accommodate longer trains, going from the current four cars to eight.
Any option, he said, is likely to be expensive.
Still, expanding capacity or making service more frequent also would be speculative, since the A-Line — which has seen the best pandemic ridership recovery of any RTD line — is still several years from hitting capacity during daytime hours under its current configuration, according to Tegan Rice, a senior service planner and scheduler at RTD.
But Flattum said more-frequent service would make it a more attractive option, encouraging more people to ride because of the convenience offered by trains coming every 10 minutes or less.
“It’s really a question of we’re trying to plan for a Denver of 10 years from now,” he said. “We can meaningfully build on transit ridership and on transit culture by getting the A-Line right. It’s viewed, I think correctly, as RTD’s best line.”
Toderian, the Vancouver planning expert, urged city leaders to bet boldly on transit — beyond simply improving one rail line. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be convenient for enough people.
“Transit is going to be the key answer there,” he said. “So you need the transit service (on the A-Line) to work better and then you need BRT (bus rapid transit) — not just feeder buses that are stuck in traffic, but dedicated BRT to connect people to the stations, so they don’t have to drive. It’s a whole different vision.”
Get more Colorado news by signing up for our Mile High Roundup email newsletter.
