Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood’s idea of “shared sacrifice” to justify Phase 2 of the Dulles Rail Project is to dump more of its bloated costs onto taxpayers in Fairfax and Loudoun counties, the very people who are already on the hook for 75 percent of the $3.5 billion construction costs plus hundreds of millions more in increased operating costs once the Silver Line opens. But this huge sacrifice will not be not shared by anybody else, including the federal government, the state government, the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority and Metro riders. LaHood’s insistence that MWAA reverse its decision to build an underground station at Washington Dulles International Airport to save $404 million, which MWAA agreed to do Wednesday, has diverted the public’s attention from the fact that even with a cheaper but more inconvenient aboveground station, Dulles Rail is still not economically feasible.
Who will spend 75 minutes taking the Silver Line from downtown Washington to Dulles when they can just as easily hop aboard a MARC train and be at Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport in less time? How many luggage-toting passengers will opt to walk hundreds more feet to the Dulles terminal when a much more convenient Metro option is already available at Reagan National? Even Dulles Rail backers acknowledge that airline passengers will account for just 3.5 percent of all Silver Line riders.
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LaHood’s attempt to “cut” costs by shifting the burden of building new stations and five parking lots onto local taxpayers is a joke. But the joke’s on the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors, which this week voted 7-2 for a project that its own economic analysis indicates will be a net drain on county coffers. Unfortunately, the Fairfax County Board appears to be next in line to drink the Kool-Aid.
One-way tolls on the Dulles Toll Road needed to pay for this boondoggle are projected to reach $17 or more by 2040, which means that a typical Northern Virginia commuter will be paying $34 a day, or $680 a month, to get part of the way to work, not including gas. Odds are that traffic volume will drop as the tolls inexorably ratchet up, destroying billions of dollars in commercial and residential property values all along the Dulles corridor.
The flap over the airport station configuration has also diverted attention from MWAA’s outrageous Project Labor Agreement, which adds more to the total cost of Phase 2 than an underground tunnel and will only benefit union members employed by out-of-state contractors.
What will Northern Virginians get for paying, through increased taxes and tolls, for a transit project that will eventually cost them $7 billion — including interest — in capital costs and $1 billion more in annual operating costs? A 3 percent increase in Metro ridership and the diversion of billions of dollars from real traffic congestion relief on local roads, according to the project’s own environmental impact statement. Nowhere else in the country have local residents been expected to pay their own way into gridlock.
