The Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates doesn’t think much of the latest effort to extend Metrorail to Dulles Airport:
WASHINGTON (Map, News) - The 23-mile extension of Metrorail to Dulles costs too much, won’t cut traffic and will fail to carry as many riders as proponents claim, a top Virginia Republican legislator said Tuesday.
House Speaker William Howell, of Stafford, delivered a bleak assessment of the beleaguered rail project in an editorial board meeting with The Examiner, arguing Dulles rail is “not going to be the panacea they think it is.”
“It’s not going to take one person off the road,” Howell said.
Instead, the project may actually worsen traffic in Tysons Corner due to the increases in building density that officials will approve to accompany the line, he said.
Howell also echoed critics of Dulles Rail who argue the more than $5 billion price is far too expensive for the number of riders the line will serve. About 46,500 new riders will board the Metro extension each day by 2030, according to forecasts by the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, which is managing the project.
That comes to $ 107,526.88 for each new projected passenger, something that even the federal government is noticing:
The Federal Transit Administration is now considering whether the proposed $2.5 billion first-phase price tag is too expensive to fund for comparatively small number of new riders.
Something tells me it would be cheaper to just pay these people to stay home.
I’ve been living in Northern Virginia for nearly 17 years now and Metrorail to Dulles has been a dream of the public transportation crowd for as long as I can remember. It’s never materialized and, given how things are going, there’s a good possibility it never will. And that may not be a bad thing.
