Rocky mountain low

If you've got any travel plans that take you through the spectacular new Denver International Airport, consider adding a couple of days to your schedule just to get through the huge facility and on to your final destination.

On our way home from Colorado last week, we purposely allowed a full hour and a half between our arrival at the airport and our flight time. It was barely enough. Just as the airport itself was a couple of years late in getting off the ground, now an annoying number of passengers end up late for flights every day at DIA just because the slickly designed facility is so user-hostile.

In a sense, it's a pity the engineers ever succeeded in getting the celebrated baggage system working at DIA. If it had stayed broken, chewing up and spitting out trial suitcases as it did for a year or more, maybe DIA would never have opened. The public would have been better served.

So why pick on Denver International Airport? Simply because it's a multi-billion-dollar parable of sorts. It's a nauseating, infuriating picture of arrogant public officials supposing they know what's best for the people they're supposed to be serving. Instead of serving those people, the so-called public servants end up walking the people awkwardly through polished marble mazes leading to high-priced hamburgers and missed flights.

It would be one thing if the ideas of these public know-it-alls were forced to compete in the free market for a right to survive. But in cases like DIA, the public purse gets co-opted so that the people of Denver, Coloradans at large, and even the taxpayers of the United States are now stuck with a magnificent white-tented elephant whose bills we'll all be paying for decades to come.

When General Motors or General Electric makes a big mistake, thousands of shareholders may suffer, but those shareholders at least typically had made a free decision that they were willing to take the risks of investing in GM. Poor Denverites-and the rest of us who travel there-never really got such a choice. Whereas it costs the highly functional Colorado Springs airport 70 miles to the south just $3 to process a passenger (that's total annual airport cost divided by total annual passengers), at DIA the figure is $18.

For that $18, you get monstrous inconvenience. You have to wander your way through DIA in person to discover how really bad it is. Give the designers credit for consistency-everywhere you want to go, you have to walk, ride, or climb for some distance in exactly the opposite direction to get there. While your instincts draw you one direction-toward the departure gate-the driveways, the doorways, and the escalators move you away from your target. Your heart pounds and your insides seethe.

"If you don't like it, think what it's like to work here!" said the folks at the Avis car rental center and the USAir counter. "They tell us we'll all get used to it."

Which is precisely the problem with so much that the government presumes to do for us. We pay premium prices, what we pay for still doesn't work, it's late, we get taken in the opposite direction from the one we want to go, and we're told that sooner or later we'll get used to it.

The interminable freeway that takes you 30 miles from center-city Denver to the new airport is called Peña Boulevard, named for the city's mayor who administered the birth of DIA. You'll be fascinated to know that Mr. Peña now serves as Secretary of Transportation for the Clinton administration in Washington, D.C.

Two WORLD staffers won high honors at the annual convention of the Evangelical Press Association, an organization with 300 member periodicals from throughout the evangelical church and parachurch world. A WORLD cartoon by Rich Bishop last spring, noting the rejection of Dr. Henry Foster as surgeon general, won first place among all cartoons entered by EPA publications. In the category called "best redesign," David Freeland's new look for WORLD took a second-place award.