Our entire state has a stake in Denver International Airport – the world’s third busiest – and that includes simply being able to get there on time to catch a flight.

The long-overdue widening of congested Peña Boulevard, the only traffic conduit to the global transportation hub, is meeting resistance from the usual interests. From mass-transit zealots; from environmental groups; from urban planners who aim to dictate how the rest of us get from Point A to Point B, and even from the bicycle lobby.

And all cried out in protest last month when the Denver Regional Council of Governments voted to help fund an environmental impact study required by federal law if Peña is to expand. Their outcry was intended to make timid politicians waffle on the obvious need for widening.

Hence, the political establishment’s public pandering to the resistance. Denver Mayor Mike Johnston was singing their tune even during his mayoral campaign, having opposed widening though more recently punting on the matter, pending the impact study’s findings. Denver International Airport CEO Phil Washington similarly has been sending a mixed message through the media. He has called mass transit preferable but also holds out hope for widening Peña – as he put it in one news report – in a “responsible” way.

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Let’s hope the double-talk is only lip service to appease the peanut gallery, and that officialdom gets – and ultimately will act upon – what rank-and-file passengers using DIA got a long time ago: The only sensible path to DIA is a wider one. One meant for automobiles.

The study is only one of the federal speed bumps slowing Peña Boulevard’s improvement, so breaking ground is a few years off at best. Let’s at least ensure Colorado isn’t compounding the delays. Our state’s policy leaders need to be pushing expansion ASAP.

Peña Boulevard hasn’t expanded since 1995, when the airport opened. Since then, Colorado has added more than 2 million residents, and the number of passengers served by DIA has more than doubled. It’s way past time to accommodate that growth.

Sure, upgrading service is also in order for RTD’s A Line light rail, which serves the airport along with the agency’s SkyRide bus service. But no one in Denver’s or the state’s leadership should kid themselves about the real fix to growing gridlock on Peña – it’s more lanes.

Those leaders can rest assured it’s what everyday Coloradans want. While professional transportation planners dally; mass-transit advocates balk, and the environmental lobby fusses and fumes, most Coloradans simply want a clearer path to their flight.

They have no use for the misplaced qualms of the policy elites, whose mass-transit daydreams serve an abstract dogma rather than the flying public. It’s past time for the green fringe to stop backseat driving – and to stop viewing DIA, of all places, as a laboratory for outlandish transportation experiments.

Widening Peña of course would mean carrying more mass transit, too. Not only buses but also carpooling and the booming ride-share market. An expanded Peña also would serve local, non-DIA traffic in the rapidly growing residential and commercial areas of the northeast Denver metro area, for which the road is a key artery.

Above all, widening Peña is the only way to serve passengers from around our entire state and beyond who depend on DIA for their long-distance transportation. Let’s move forward.

Denver Gazette Editorial Board