The Virginia legislature appears to have rejected a plan to spend $300 million in state money on construction of the Dulles rail line. This is only about 10 percent of the money needed to finish the line to Dulles airport, but it will put a crimp in plans to do so.
This is a line that everyone from the Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority (WMATA or Metro) to the Federal Transit Administration to then-Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters agreed should not be built. For Metro, not building the line was practically a matter of survival: it can’t afford to maintain the lines it has now, much less any new ones. On top of that, the Silver line will share tracks with the Orange and Blue lines in downtown Washington, and those tracks are already being used to capacity at rush hour. This means every Silver line train will require one less train on the Orange and Blue lines, increasing crowding and likely turning off riders.
For Peters and the FTA, it was simply a matter of cost-efficiency: studies showed that bus-rapid transit would work nearly as well as rail at a tiny fraction of the cost. But developers at Tysons Corner wanted to increase the density of their development, and Fairfax County planners said the area didn’t have the transportation facilities to support more density. So the developers convinced the Virginia Congressional delegation to persuade then-President Bush to overrule Peters’ decision.
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Ironically (though not surprisingly), Fairfax planners concluded that the rail line wouldn’t carry enough people to justify higher density. So even Tysons developers won’t benefit from the billions being spent building the rail line.
Due partly to WMATA’s opposition, actual construction is being done by the Metropolitan Washington Airport Authority, and much of the money for construction is coming from tolls collected from the Dulles Tollway, which was gifted to the airport authority by the state of Virginia. With the loss of the state’s $300 million, the airport authority may simply raise toll rates again. But it is pretty close to the point where higher tolls will mean lower revenues because drivers will seek alternative routes.
Meanwhile, Florida Governor Rick Scott has vetoed a bill, H.B. 865, that would have allowed the Pinellas County (St. Petersburg) transit system to fund itself out of sales taxes instead of property taxes. If the transit agency had obtained voter approval for this change, it would have greatly increased its revenues, enabling it to build, you guessed it, a $1.7 billion light-rail line. Another day, another boondoggle.
My understanding is that the current impasse with the Virginia legislature has to do with the MWAA’s (and thus read DC and MD appointees, which together outnumber VA appointees) insistence on giving a 10% or higher extra award fee to contractors that agree to “project labor agreements;” i.e., paying their workers union rates, allowing collective bargaining, etc. Virginia is a right to work state, but even aside from that, the legislature doesn’t want to pay an extra $300 million when that money would essentially be going entirely to the extra award fees / unions.
I believe that the Virginia leadership has said that they would cough up their money if the project labor agreements bonus money were abandoned.
The construction is visible from the Beltway and is awesome.
But, the Silver Line is only going to make things worse everywhere else. I guess if the Silver Line cars ran out to the end of the Orange and Blue lines there wouldn’t be any noticable slow downs. I still think closing a few stations downtown and putting in some express by-pass tracks at a few key stations, will bring the biggest improvement in capacity and ridership.
Having missed a flight from Dulles after my bus was stuck in traffic and delayed by 45 minutes I haven’t been back. When I can’t get a flight out of National I head for BWI.
Either build a rail link out to Dulles or dedicated bus lanes but the current difficulty in getting out to Dulles is probably a clear reason why domestic air traffic out of Dulles continues to decline and National and BWI continues to increase. Increasingly Dulles is becoming a hub for connecting United passengers and Nova residents while the rest of the region avoids it at all costs.
Not only does it look like the Minnesota legislature is refusing to fund a new Vikings stadium but all the support the Pioneer Press and Star Tribune seemed to imply existed for building another light rail line in the SW Corridor didn’t seem to be there. One has to wonder if the anemic ridership numbers for the Northstar line and the shenanigans with the Central Corridor have them thinking twice about committing more money.
@Antiplanner, I’d be curious on your thoughts about 2 local HSR projects. They’re the Northern Lights Express and Zip Rail. Northern Lights project has been around every since Amtrak dropped its St. Paul to Duluth route in the 80s. It carries the torch for Minnesota long tradition of pork barrel projects for the Iron Range. Recently they got a million or three in various grants to survey possible routes.
Zip Rail is a very vague proposal to build a new rail line between Rochester, Minnesota and Minneapolis. There is no current rail connection between the two cities. Like Northern Lights it would connect a small town with the Twin Cities. It seems to survive because the Souteast Minnesota Rail Alliance only exists as long as it pushes it and one other pie-in-the-sky project, a rail bypass of Rochester. Zip Rail has seemed to pick up importance as the rail bypass issue has been dieing a quiet death. Most interesting to me is that the distance involved for building it nearly identical to the Orlando-Tampa HSR route. They also had some transit economist, one that had previously said 100 miles was the minimum to make HSR work, put together a report trumpeting all the wonderful things it would do.
Anywho…. maybe VAs rejection for funding will be the sort of catalyst that will kill the Dulles line?
Those aren’t HSR projects.