In a discussion that spanned hours on Monday, March 18, councilmembers shared concerns that activists and citizens have been sounding the alarm over since the update to what is essentially the only road to Denver International Airport was conceived. Council eventually approved the grant 7-6, with opposing members asking for a guarantee that the agency in charge of the study would research alternatives to highway expansion, including the A Line light rail route that runs from downtown Denver’s Union Station to the airport.
“My concern is and has been with the scope of what DEN is choosing to study in the environmental impact statement process, and what the airport is choosing to exclude from further consideration,” Councilwoman Sarah Parady said during the meeting. “Specifically, excluding from the environmental impact study any consideration on how to move some of that traffic congestion over to the A Line that runs parallel to that corridor and is operated by the Regional Transportation District (RTD).”
Construction has already begun on a planned $51 million upgrade to Peña that is supposed to expand, repave and add ramps to the highway. According to DIA, this upgrade could take up to 900 days and is being funded by internal airport revenue streams.
As a two-and-a-half-year project on the highway gets going, some councilmembers said they had heard feedback from constituents who worried that no consideration was given to multimodal transportation projects, with the study only covering expanding the highway or leaving it be.
What Will the Peña Boulevard Study Examine?
City Council was asked to approve a Colorado Department of Transportation and Infrastructure grant awarded by the Denver Regional Council of Governments in August to examine improvements on the corridor. “The improvements include managed lanes and adjacent multi-use trail facilities to connect cyclists to DEN/adjacent developments, existing regional trail systems, and RTD A-Line stations,” the ordinance request explains.
Managed lanes could be bus-only lanes where others would pay a toll, or toll roads or high-occupancy vehicle lanes. The airport said it will study incentivizing A-Line use, but maintained that it can’t consider capital improvements because that is out of DIA’s scope of responsibility. Additionally, DIA is considering adding frontage roads that could allow locals to avoid Peña, or creating a possible airport express route.
“DEN is faced with the challenge of increased congestion on Peña Boulevard and a limited ability to expand the highway capacity due to construction costs, and environmental and societal impacts,” the ordinance request continues. “As such, DEN is taking advantage of the opportunity to address mobility needs and provide travel options through a combination of limited capacity expansion coupled with operational strategies that seek to manage travel demand and improve transit and other forms of ridesharing.”
In addition to the $5 million grant, DIA will chip in $13.5 million, for a total of $18.5 million going to the multi-year environmental impact study mandated by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). It is predicted that by 2050 there will be an average of 186,000 vehicles per day on Peña.
But widening roads, even with managed lanes, has been shown to induce traffic demand because those roads attract more drivers, according to one study done in California. Then, more greenhouse gas emissions occur along those corridors, which is a concern for project detractors.
How Climate Change Factors Into the Peña Decision
“As councilmembers, we hear from our constituents all the time about the need to take more aggressive climate action, to create transit alternatives and to commit to fight for sustainability,” Parady said. “Now's our moment. … Just about every climate expert from the federal level, the state level, the local level has been sounding the alarm for decades about what highway expansions do to set back emissions goals.”Under NEPA requirements, options that go unanalyzed in an environmental study cannot be considered in the future without putting the city and airport at risk for litigation, Parady pointed out. But other councilmembers, such as Kevin Flynn, said that transit-oriented options wouldn’t fix the congestion problem on Peña.
“Suggesting that instead of studying Peña Boulevard expansion, we should expand the A Line is like your doctor telling you that your arteries are clogged but instead of a coronary bypass he wants to give you a knee replacement,” Flynn said. “It just doesn't address the same needs.”
Councilman Paul Kashmann said he could understand the need to expand Peña, but felt that DIA declining to study transportation options besides driving “simply lacks any degree of real imagination as to how we participate in mitigating what is the greatest threat of our time: climate change.”
Even if the A Line isn’t the solution, Kashmann argued, other options need to be on the table.
According to Lisa Nguyen, principal transportation planner for DIA, the airport plans to use $1.2 million of the grant dollars to implement its Transportation Demand Management Plan, and that aims to reduce vehicle travel to the airport.
“This is much more than a roadway project,” Nguyen said at the council meeting. “This is a mobility project. This is how we move people. Not only across the corridor, but within the community as well.”
Councilwoman Stacie Gilmore, whose district encompasses almost all of Peña, said she would vote for the funding because of the community she represents. According to Gilmore, her constituents have serious fears about the impact on their area if the road isn’t expanded. For example, they worry it could cause more semi trucks or even regular vehicles to use their neighborhood roads in attempts to avoid congestion on Peña.
“That means that children, when they’re getting out of school at 3 p.m., they're going to have people trying to zip through the neighborhood at the same time to make a flight,” Gilmore said. “That increases the greenhouse gas emissions that are right next to our single-family homes. It's right next to our schools, and it's right next to our parks and our daycares.”
Gilmore said her constituents believe it should be at least a four-lane road. However, Councilwoman Serena Gonzales-Gutierrez said she has heard from residents of Montbello and Green Valley Ranch, both of which are near Peña, and they have concerns about the lack of transit options in the area, too.
Councilwoman Shontel Lewis, whose district covers the stretch of Interstate 70 leading to Peña, said that after serving on the RTD board and working on its compliance with federal anti-discrimination rules for years, she had learned to consider who would be burdened by each project.
“Many of the folks that we've talked about, the Black and brown communities, low-income communities, are actually the ones that are actually going to be burdened long-term by our decision not to expand our opportunity to study this,” Lewis argued. “Highway expansion shouldn't be our city's primary strategy to address traffic.”
Lewis said she expects that she and Gilmore will hear from upset citizens after construction starts.
Last month, City Council approved a $50.8 million contract with Flatiron Constructors to approve the current Peña project. Councilman Chris Hinds, Lewis and Parady voted against that contract for similar reasons to their objections to the grant approved on Monday. They were joined in dissent on March 18 by Gonzales-Gutierrez, Kashmann and Councilman Darrell Watson.
“This is not a conversation about just today," Lewis said. "This is a conversation about decisions that we are making as a body for the next seven generations, and, at a minimum, ten years. What we are asking is that we are cognizant of the opportunity for us to think about all of the options that could potentially be on the table.”
To the dismay of Lewis, however, the study will move ahead without a guarantee that additional options will be considered.
