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 topay 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.
BRT is not only superior in terms of cost and travel time, it can move just as many commuters as heavy rail. For example, Roth points out that New York’s Lincoln Tunnel Express Bus Lane carries 32,600 passengers per lane in the peak rush hour — nearly four times the number forecast to ride Dulles Rail. BRT is also much more flexible than trains running on fixed tracks in the event of a natural or man-made disaster. That alone should have tipped the balance in BRT’s favor, but this low-cost, high-service alternative was never given a chance to compete with Metro rail on a project FTA already considers a poor use of federal tax dollars.
Having been thrown under the train by their own locally elected representatives, Fairfax County taxpayers’ only hope now is that the FTA will ultimately refuse to sign off on this looming financial and aesthetic disaster. It won’t be hard for the feds to find a better use for the funds.
