The D.C. Examiner takes a look at the Metrorail to Dulles project, which is being touted as one of the greatest transportation achievements in Northern Virginia in decades, and finds that there’s quite less than meets the eye:
WASHINGTON (Map, News) - How’s this for a deal? Riding the $5.14 billion Dulles Rail extension will take twice as long as taking a $300 million Bus Rapid Transit vehicle (BRT) to the same place. That’s right, a 25-minute express bus trip from the Pentagon to Reston would take 57 minutes on the proposed Metrorail extension and cost much more per trip for a lower level of service, according to international transportation economist Gabriel Roth.
A different kind of math was used Monday when the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors voted 8-2 to commit $400 million to put 27-foot-high Metro rail tracks across the length of Tysons Corner from Falls Church to the Dulles Toll Road. The wealthy land owners who will gain the most from Metro rail going through Tysons Corner preferred a tunnel. Efficiency experts like Roth pointed to BRT as a better solution. What we are getting instead are the elevated tracks nobody wants because local officials fear the Federal Transit Administration might soon withdraw a $900 million subsidy, as it threatened to do months ago when tunnel supporters appeared to be gaining support.
Had the board accepted the FTA’s prior offer to pay 90 percent of the cost of a BRT demonstration project from Falls Church to Dulles International Airport, airline passengers would be using it today instead of having to wait until 2016 for the rail extension. Even then, the airport station is projected to have the lowest number of passengers of all 75 Metro stops. Don’t be surprised if our experience mirrors San Francisco’s BART system, which attracted less than half of the riders initially projected to ride it to San Francisco International Airport, forcing service cuts that made transit even less attractive to suitcase-laden travelers.
That’s right, it will take nine years to complete a project that will be more expensive and less efficient than something that could have been up and running by now. And, thanks to Fairfax County’s vote this week, it will turn Tysons Corner into even more of an esthetic and traffic disaster area.
Nice work guys.
H/T: Virginia Virtucon
