Two years ago, the federal Base Realignment and Closure Commission voted to move 22,000 military and civilian Defense Department employees to more secure facilities at Fort Belvoir. By law, the needed upgrades of Fort Belvoir — the most extensive changes required of any military installation in the country as a result of BRAC — must be completed by September 2011. That’s just four years from now.
The Army says it fully intends to meet that deadline. But there’s no way the Commonwealth of Virginia or Fairfax County will beready.
Why? Because the $4.5 billion Dulles Corridor Metrorail Project threatens to suck up practically all of the available transportation money over the next several decades, leaving virtually nothing left over for Fort Belvoir, which is already Fairfax County’s largest employer. Although the number of fort employees will double over the next four years and thousands of private sector jobs are expected to be added nearby, state and local officials still don’t have a clue how nearby roads will handle all these newcomers.
Interstate 95, U.S. Route 1 and all the local secondary roads are uncomfortably clogged now. The Fairfax County Parkway — the county’s own road to nowhere — has a 1.9-mile missing link. And it’s too far to walk from the 8,656-acre fort to the closest Metro or Virginia Railway Express station.
Current transportation plans assume that thousands of new Fort Belvoir commuters will take the completed Fairfax County Parkway through the Engineer Proving Grounds. Army Col. Brian Lauritzen, who is in charge of the BRAC move, says the fiscal 2007 National Defense Authorization Act “requires VDOT to pay the design and construction costs of the parkway — both on and off EPG — regardless of who builds it.”
But neither the Commonwealth of Virginia nor the Fairfax Board of Supervisors has set aside any money to complete this critical road link even though state Transportation Secretary Pierce Homer warned last month of “an additional five-mile backup on I-95” — every day — if it’s not finished. Not only would such a bottleneck be an environmental disaster, it would seriously clog traffic along the East Coast’s already-constricted major artery.
Knowing this, why are state and county officials still determined to put all their transportation eggs into the Dulles Rail basket? It would make much more sense to downsize to a bus rapid transit system — which can be built for a tenth of the cost of heavy rail — and use the savings to complete and expand the Fairfax County Parkway, build an interchange to connect it to I-95, and then provide BRT service via the new Beltway HOT lanes to Tysons Corner, Dulles Airport AND Fort Belvoir.
But that would mean putting the public interest first for a change. And that’s a fairly far-fetched idea in Virginia’s cloud cuckoo-land.
