Dulles Rail All But Dead shrills the Washington Post. The idea of extending Washington’s MetroRail system 23 miles to (and slightly beyond) Dulles Airport has been around for years, but its huge expense — at least $5 billion or more than $200 million per mile — has been daunting.
To provide local matching funds, northern Virginia counties recently created a huge transportation authority that would tax home sales, hotel rooms, rental cars, and auto repairs to pay for local road and transit projects. It was generally understood that a large share of the authority’s money would go to Dulles rail, but local officials were counting on federal funding for at least half the cost of the project.
Only 12 percent of air travelers who fly out of National Airport use MetroRail to get to and from the airport. No other airport rail line in the country carries more than 8 percent of air travelers.
Flickr photo by sethladd.
Last week, Transportation Secretary Mary Peters and FTA Administrator James Simpson stunned northern Virginia officials by announcing that they were disqualifying the project from federal funding. Washington’s Metro, they said, was unable to manage the rail lines it has today, and certainly did not seem capable of building and operating 22 percent more miles.
The Washington Post did not hesitate to let readers know in the very first paragraph of its story that the rail project is “widely considered crucial to the region’s economic future.” Plus, an editorial complained that “international airports in Chicago, London, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Sydney are served by passenger rail lines,” so why not Washington?
This was followed by a “news report” claiming that the Department of Transportation had somehow misled Virginia officials into thinking that it would support the rail project and then backed out without warning. But that’s not really true.
Several years ago, the Department of Transportation issued new rules requiring rail projects to meet cost-effectiveness tests that the Dulles line obvious could not meet. In its recent transportation bill, Congress exempted four projects from those tests: BART to San Jose, a light-rail tunnel in San Francisco, the Wilsonville commuter rail in the Portland area, and the Dulles rail project. Despite that exemption, it was hardly a secret that Dulles rail was controversial and that Secretary Peters was looking askance and such expensive projects.
Personal anecdote: The Antiplanner happened to fly from KC to DC the day of the Dulles announcement. Since I am one of the 12 percent of air travelers into Reagan National who take Metro Rail, I headed straight for the outdoor Metro station, where I told myself it was warm (28 degrees) compared with the 3 degrees I left in Kansas City. Since I travel light, I had nothing more than a hat and gloves to supplement the thin wool fabric of the suit I uncomfortably wore.
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Meanwhile, the PA system repeatedly announced that smoke in the Clarendon station had shut down through service on the Orange line. Passengers to Vienna would have to transfer to buses at Courthouse, and then back to the train at GMU. Sounds like fun in 28-degree weather.
The system has suffered such smoke events before and no one seems to be sure what is causing them. But they underscore the $10 billion that Metro doesn’t have to rehabilitate its system and keep it running.
A train finally arrived and I gratefully entered the warm cars. It turned out to be a blue train. On Saturday, when I returned home to Oregon, I would have taken Metro again — except that Metro trains don’t start running until 7 am on Saturdays, and my plane left at 7:05. No wonder 88 percent of air travelers don’t use Metro.
So is Dulles rail really dead? “The contract to build the rail line has an escalation clause beginning Feb. 1,” says the Post. “If it kicks in, it would probably cause the state to terminate the contract and start the process over again.” But rail watchers know that no rail project is ever really dead. Once Bush leaves office and Democrats raise gas taxes — dedicating at least 40 percent of the increase to transit — the threat of Dulles rail will no doubt rise again.
Ironically, immediately adjacent to Saturday’s Post article about Dulles rail was an article about brave residents of Shanghai organizing marches and other protests. Are they advocating human rights? Protesting restrictions on freedom of speech? Demanding complete access to the Internet?
None of these. You have to read to the article’s fourth paragraph to find out, but they are protesting the proposed extension of Shanghai’s maglev train. This train, which currently connects downtown Shanghai with its international airport, can go more than 250 miles per hour. But even after reducing fares, it has been running mostly empty. Air travelers say it doesn’t go where they want to go. “It may take me longer, but the taxi is more convenient,” says one.
Fast but inconvenient.
Flickr photo by Andava.
So why, Shanghai residents ask, waste more money extending an expensive rail project that doesn’t work that well in the first place? That’s a question that the Washington Post should be asking as well.
On Saturday, when I returned home to Oregon, I would have taken Metro again  except that Metro trains don’t start running until 7 am on Saturdays, and my plane left at 7:05. No wonder 88 percent of air travelers don’t use Metro
You seem to be suggesting that more air travelers would use Metro if there were more trains running at more times.
Sounds like a rationale for building more train lines.
You’ve fallen into the trap.
The tough part about using a train to airport system is luggage. Trains are just nowhere near as useful as cars when you are carrying stuff. So a train to the airport can be super convenient for business people carrying little or nothing and traveling alone on a day trip. When you are packing for a week, walking to a train and negotiating the train (invariably standing in the middle of the train car with luggage and passengers trying to get around you), stairs and transfers, it’s just not easy. factor in cold weather, bringing your children with you, and it’s just not the best way to get to an airport. It’s great for young vigorous people on a budget, so the youth hostel set is always seen on the trains, but rarey a good option for a family of five trying to make a 7 a.m. flight from Newark to Miami. Those billions would probably be best spent on dedicated lanes to Dulles. I write this as a person who has often used the Blue line to O’Hare and the wretched air train system at JFK and Newark when traveling alone and with nothing but a duffel bag.
rarey a good option for a family of five trying to make a 7 a.m. flight from Newark to Miami
Moral of the story: don’t have so many kids. Virtually every problem “we’re” trying to solve will be less of a problem as a result.
The key here is that Virginia and/or metro DC (Va, DC, MD) can build this line. They’re just not going to get matching federal funds for it at this point. And if the line is, as supporters claim, “widely considered crucial to the region’s economic future.†then spending $10 billion compare to $5 billion is nothing compared to the overall economy of the region.
Although that does raise a HUGE question with that claim. When did Dulles open? 1965? Seems like that region has had 40+ years of enormous growth both in terms of population growth and even more so in terms of jobs (both in number and of salary). How did this happen without the rail line?
Don’t have “so many kids”? Try taking the train to the plane with one or two — strollers and trains just don’t go together. Or is one or two also too many?
If there was ever a corridor made for bus rapid transit, this would seem to be it. The Dulles Toll Road already includes separated express lanes between the airport and the beltway. These could easily accomodate frequent scheduled bus service between an existing Metro station and Dulles at a tiny fraction of the cost of building a Metrorail line.
But this assumes the rationale for building the Metrorail line is to provide high-quality transit service for airport users, which of course isn’t the case. I sat in on a transit board hearing for a downtown-airport line being planned in Sacramento. The board’s Washington representative (i.e., lobbyist) admitted that rail lines to airports such as Atlanta actually carry very few travelers. The majority of riders are people who work at the airport. Those travelers who do use transit are those going on day trips, carrying little if any luggage other than a briefcase. As mentioned above, for anyone dealing with luggage or kids, the extra cost of a Super Shuttle or cab is likely to be well worth it.
All that said, I wouldn’t shoot down the idea of airport rail categorically. I think Chicago’s Blue and Orange lines work decently, in that they simply take a relatively useful rail line and put an airport stop on it. It’s the notion of building an entirely separate system justified by airport users that seems to me to be a poor use of resources. You can see that in NYC, where a separate rail line using different equipment, on a different gauge than the rest of the system, was built to link to JFK. The system is better than nothing, but as a matter of cost-effectiveness I just doubt it made more sense than adding a couple lanes to the Van Wyck. NJ similalrly built a monorail system for Newark airport (I call it Six Flags Over Newark), rather than extend the serviceable PATH system west by a few miles from it’s current downtown Newark terminus. These systems require separate connections and transfers that make them very difficult to use for all but the most physically fit, time insensitive and cost-conscious travelers.
These systems also seem to assume that most travelers are going from central city to airport. The crowds that overwhelm airports at holidays and during the summer are not made up of business travelers or the study abroad set. They ae made up of families traveling. They are not coming from a central business district and they require parking spaces more than nifty rail systems to cart the kids luggage and gifts.
The notion of airport workers using the system was actually a key justification used for the JFK and Newark links. And there is probably a point to that in the space constrained NYC area, in that putting airport workers on a train frees up parking slots for travellers. Again, not sure that justifies not simply applying the billions spent to some large parking garages and maybe new lanes with enhanced bus service.
Comments on the news:
“THE INTERNATIONAL airports in Chicago, London, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Sydney are served by passenger rail lines. Those in Kampala, Ulan Bator and Tegucigalpa are not. The Bush administration has now, for all intents and purposes, decided that Washington, D.C., belongs forever in the second category and not in the first.”
This is an argument for prestige. Prestige is a bit like acid, only more potent, in that it dissolves countries. Some politicians will do anything to get their prestige, including spending obscene amounts on a project. Then when something straightforwards is required, a much smaller sum of money, the country cannot afford it.
In the UK, we’ve had a mixed bag. Leeds, UK, wanted a light rail system, because they were the largest city in Europe without one. An argument for prestige. They got short shrift, which was a good thing. However, we seem to have acquired an Olympic Games, at £9bn/$18bn and rising. Apparently, it is very prestigious. At the same time, the police have been told that their pay rise has been cut. They exchanged the right to strike for pay levels set by arbitation. The government hasn’t got the £30m/$60m it would take to pay them the agreed amount.
Eddie: The blame for the less-than-ideal arrangements at Newark Liberty and JFK airports lies partly with the FAA, which has a too-restrictive interpretation of its rule that allows Aviation Trust Fund money to be spent on improvements to airport access.
For a rail line in an urban area to improve access to an airport, it should operate as an integral part of any existing rail transit system. The New York MTA had originally proposed a new rail spur from a nearby subway line to JFK that would have done just that, but the FAA told the Port Authority that it could not use ATF money to help build it on the grounds that the trains that ran on the spur could also take passengers between destinations off airport property. So instead we get a physically separate rail shuttle that requires a transfer to the regional rail network instead of a simpler and more useful subway spur.
Inasmuch as most of the US airports that could be served by rail transit now are, it’s pretty much too late for the FAA to revisit its policy, but perhaps it should anyway.
Aptly stated, Francis. Anyone who is familiar with the DC public school system could make the same argument here.
D4P — Actually the lesson of no-trains-before-7 am is that so few people ride at that time that Metro can’t justify running trains then. Metro hours used to be longer, but given the high deficits it already faces it can’t afford to run empty trains.
Veddie Edder — The rail line to national airport carries a larger percentage of air travelers than any other airport rail line in the country, including Chicago’s. Chicago’s system may work for you, but it apparently doesn’t work for most air travelers.
Chicago’s system may work for you, but it apparently doesn’t work for most air travelers.
Last fall I went to Baltimore to speak & stayed to play. We didn’t rent a car the entire time. Went to DC and did the museum thing. Oh, we were forced to…to…walk! and all, but we had no need for a car. I suspect the train doesn’t work because our obesity epidemic makes walking more than a block tough for the typical Murrican. Just a thought.
DS
This Fairfax rail-to-Dulles project is, and has been from the start, a boondoggle of the highest order. It has never been about rail to Dulles — not enough constituents to justify the cost. To make it work, the developers morphed it into a way to blackmail the county fathers into granting increased density along the corridor. This led to multiple stops through Tysons, which doubled (at least) the cost. Then, to get the cost down, they decided to go with an elevated section. Some developers were OK with that, and some were not. The ones opposed spent millions on a PR campaign to whip up local opposition to elevated stations. Meanwhile, the costs grew, and analysis of the costs was prohibited. Some genius decided to pay for a large block of costs with tolls from the airport road — except every analysis of the toll revenues, however they might be increased, shows that they can never service the debt. Oh, and the new rail line doesn’t reduce traffic. And oh, the new rail line has so few passengers that all the previous cost-effectiveness measures fail; and when they create newer, easier-to-pass measures, those fail, too. And, oh, the one subway tunnel that runs under the Potomac from Virginia to DC is already at capacity — more train cars would be a bit of a problem. Etc. etc. etc. The whole thing is so obviously a mess, the wonder is that people haven’t risen up. But then, they haven’t been told that county tax revenues actually hold the ultimate risk for dramatic overruns. The FTA has courageous staff specialists who provided the backbone to the Secretary to stop the infusion of federal funds. Truth to power — it doesn’t happen often. But, of course this story is not over. Too many special interests have too much at stake, and the real facts have been largely hidden. Stay tuned.
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MarketStEl: That’s correct, the FAA forced that $8 ticket surcharge money to be used in an inefficient way. I’m not saying the PA didn’t have a reason for what it did, I’m just noting that what was built was less than ideal. The NY/NJ august congressional delegations should have sought a waiver from the rule or law or whatever it was, buit that would assume that people in Congress have a clue as to what constitutes useful infrastructure and the power of infrastructure to positively transform a city. They don’t.
Antiplanner, I actually think the blue/orange lines are useful. The are part of an integrated system of which the airport stop is not quite incidental but not the sole justification (note that the Blue Line got to O’Hare by means of an extension off an existing rail line — it wasn’t a soup to nuts rail to airport project). These lines serve neighborhoods from the airport to the Loop. The typical user of the line probably doesn’t often use the airport stop at all. Whether the line was useful for me personally is less relevant, but in the case of the Orange and Blue I wouldn’t necessarily have a laser beam focus on what percentage of airport travelers get to Midway/O’Hare by the system. If someone is trotting out the notion, expressly or implicitly, that the average Dulles user is going to take Metro, then that person is way off for all the reasons I noted in posts above. The question is whether the line is generally useful for enough users to justify the cost. I doubt Dulles Metro can do that, but I think the Blue Line carries thousands and gives airport passengers a good direct shot to downtown. Also, the Loop is a highly dense (albeit small) core, built off passenger rail hubs in a way that the business centers of DC / northern VA are not. All that said, I really wish Illinois would build the Crosstown Expressway and add some lanes to the Ike, because that road is an unholy mess.
I agree with your assessment of the Port Authority’s actions, Veddie, as well as your assessment of the Chicago Blue Line O’Hare extension.
Both it and the SEPTA R1 Airport Regional Rail line raise similar issues, though — they are extensions of existing rail transit networks built to serve an airport. I now wonder:
Did any Aviation Trust Fund money go into constructing any of the infrastructure on either of these lines? If so, was it spent on anything other than the track and stations on the airport property, which I couldn’t imagine the FAA disallowing under even the narrowest interpretation of the rule? And if there was ATF money involved in building the O’Hare and Philadelphia International Airport rail stations, what kept New York’s transport agencies from making a similar distinction for purposes of getting a subway spur built?
I’m pretty sure that the O’Hare Blue Line extension pre-dated the aviation trust fund. The Orange Line was also circa the 80s, although I think that line only started running trains in the early 90s. As I recall the line was completed, but stood idle for a year or so while the CTA gathered up the funds to start running trains on it. O’Hare does have an onsite monorail connecting the terminals and parking lots, which was started around the time of the trust fund, and I bet that was built using that money. No idea on the Phili stuff. I didn’t even know they had a train line going there to be honest. Must be empty most of the time. At least Phili invested in improvements to the approach roads to the airport, and they seem to have decent parking there.
I recall news reports at the time of air train’s planning mentioning that building a more useful line in NY would require a waiver, but I don’t know if a waiver was ever pursued. The JFK system is actually a nice ride. The problem is that it requires an idiotic transfer at one of two stations in Queens after a relatively long ride to the intermediate station. In Newark, the monorail is too small for the traffic it handles — literally the cars are just too small for passengers with much baggage. The system then leaves you on an open air platform on an ugly section of the northeast corridor line. The special purpose station, which shockingly is not served by a parking lot, is served by a minority of commuter and inter-city trains. From that intermediate station you can take a train a couple miles into the main Newrak station (after many trains have passed the intermediate station without stopping) where you can transfer to yet another train if you want to head within Jersey or to lower Manhattan. Compared with this, the blue line actually runs right to the grounds of the airport, is relatively fast, and takes you to the Loop without requiring a transfer. It won’t help you if you are coming from points north of the airport, or east or west, but for it’s narrow purpose it’s a perfectly useful line.
By the way, if I had to guess, I’d say that not getting an FAA waiver perversely facilitated getting the air train stuff built. Anyone who knows anything about the MTA knows that it can’t seem to build a popsicle stick fort without it taking 75 years and costing a trillion dollars. The PA is slow, bureaucratic and not cost effective, but they are the last agency left in the NY area that can still build things and that shows an actual desire to do so. NY is so densely populated, and has such a pent up demand for mobility that virtually any bit of public infrastructure is going to be used no matter how ineffcient compared to what you’d put in if you could achieve the ideal.
Re Veddie Edder’s comment:
“NJ similalrly built a monorail system for Newark airport (I call it Six Flags Over Newark), rather than extend the serviceable PATH system west by a few miles from it’s current downtown Newark terminus.
You’re correct and I think the PA knows it made a mistake in this regard; the PATH extension is still listed as a “candidate” project in its capital budget.
Regarding the JFK AirTrain, since 1968 the MTA has always planned to to run a separate rail line from Manhattan to JFK, linked with the LIRR.* Running either the A/C or the J subways closer to JFK was never an option, and would have done nothing to ease the trip even if built. From midtown Manhattan, your looking at over 1 1/2 hours out to the terminus of each line. BTW, both lines have shared track — you can’t run expresses.
The problem with JFK, and LGA and EWR, is performance. All three airports regularly fill out the bottom spots for diversions, cancellations, and delays, for which the PA has to take the blame. In retrospect, the airlines were right; the passsenger surcharge should have been used to improve facilities; instead JFK got an incredibly expensive employee transportation system and parking lot shuttle, with the FAA now considering flight restrictions. Meanwhile, the PA is still locked into the Freedom Tower and replacement PATH station–each is more than $1 billion over budget.
*the rail link made its way into Mayor Bloomberg’s “PlaNYC” transportation plan, the funding for same he intends to throw under the bus for the 2nd Ave subway, itself already underfunded.
A mistake in 18 above; the E train from Manhattan runs express in Queens weekdays to the Jamaica station, and could probably get you to JFK in under an hour, and a working link, I hope.
“Express” is a relative term when it comes to the E Train. Also, note that the times when it’s running express are probably the same times when there’s not much room on it for you, your luggage and any of your travel companions. On the other hand, the city could have extended the yellow line (whatever letters the MTA’s using these days) one stop to La Guardia and removed a ton of cabs from the LIE. But then you wouldn’t have a nifty monorail…
That maglev in China is over kill for that situation.
Also with JFK in would have been better just to extend track from an existing Long Island Railroad line and run commuter and Amtrak trains to the airport, though part of it could be tied into a subway line as well.
That said air travelers would only make up part of the users.
Just as with roads, not every one using the street in front of your house is going or coming to your house.