A seven-year, $1.2 billion expansion and modernization project at Denver International Airport should keep the once-controversial facility at the center of Colorado’s growing economy.
DIA’s success has vindicated three generations of political and business leaders who fought to erase narrow jurisdictional rivalries and create a world-class aviation facility with room to grow along with Colorado’s future.
Planning for DIA began back in the administration of the late Denver Mayor Bill McNichols, who frequently urged a new airport be built by 2000. Mayor Federico Peña built the political framework for DIA by working with metropolitan business and political leaders – especially the Adams County Partners for Progress – to craft the coalition that led to voter approval of Denver’s plan to annex the land upon which DIA now stands. Construction was finished and the airport began operations on Mayor Wellington Webb’s watch, despite an expensive and embarrassing snag with an unworkable automated baggage system.
Now, Mayor John Hickenlooper’s administration is proposing a major expansion of DIA that will include a new terminal for up to 23 commuter planes on Concourse C, 10 new mainline jet gates, another covered parking garage and a commuter rail station for the Regional Transportation District’s FasTracks train that will link DIA to Union Station.
We’re particularly glad to see the commuter rail link going in, both because it will allow travelers to bypass one of DIA’s major drawbacks – the high cost of cab fare to downtown – and because it exemplifies the kind of regional cooperation that led to DIA’s success in the first place. From Union Station, travelers will be able to catch high-speed trains to the Denver Tech Center or go to other parts of the eight metro-area counties served all or in part by RTD.
DIA’s success can be measured by several statistics, but perhaps the most significant is the cost per passenger charged to airlines. Capped at $20 in 1995 dollars, per passenger charges opened at about $17 and have now fallen to about $11. Average costs are dropping because DIA’s fixed costs can be spread over a growing passenger volume. DIA, with 47.3 million passengers last year, is now the fifth-busiest U.S. facility and ranks 10th worldwide.
Such growth should easily justify the new facilities which, in turn, should open Denver up to more varied routes and further help our tourism trade and business in general. We will admit we gulped when learning airport authorities would again consider automating part of the baggage system. But, unlike in 1995, they’ve sworn not to put in anything that hasn’t been thoroughly proven elsewhere.
In the end, historians will probably rank the decision of metro leaders to abandon hopelessly constrained Stapleton Airport for DIA with the vision shown a century earlier by Colorado Territory leaders, who in 1867 formed the Denver Pacific Railway to provide links with the Kansas Pacific and Union Pacific railroads in the 1870s. Colorado, once seen as being in “the middle of nowhere,” is now capitalizing on the fact that it is also “halfway to everywhere” and a key hub in the international aviation network.
