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Rail
to Dulles is dead! Long Live Rail to Dulles! Or,
is it really dead this time?
OK,
you thought we had written all there was to
write on this topic. Sorry, the story goes on. (To
catch up on this long-running saga, review the
articles and blog posts in End
Note One.)
In
a three-plus column headline on page one, above
the fold, WaPo's 25
January issue says it all: “DULLES RAIL ALL
BUT DEAD.” The story by Amy Gardner provides
the “He Said, She Said” essence of a 24
January fed / state / Authority meeting and a
follow-up letter from the Federal Transit
Administration. A 26 January WaPo story covers
much of the same ground.
Who
Killed Rail to Dulles?
The
first question is: “Who is who killed METRO
Rail to Washington Dulles International
Airport?” More to the point: Who killed METRO
to Tysons Corner? Turns out many contributed to
the demise but there is one fattest rat in the
woodpile. Here is a rogues gallery in ascending
order of culpability:
The
Feds: There was not a snowball’s chance in
hell that the ideologues at the U.S. Department
of Transportation would approve nearly $1
billion dollars of federal money for the project
that would benefit a Donkey Clan governor of a
swing state. The current administration saves
that sort of money for contributors, party
members and Agency players. However, it should
not be overlooked that there are very valid
reasons for the feds to turn down the request as
Jim Bacon, Larry Gross and WaPo readers
point out in blog postings.
The
Commonwealth of Virginia: Gov. Timothy M.
Kaine seems to grasp the importance of a
shared-vehicle system serving Tysons Corner,
Reston and Dulles but he put political
light-weights in charge of the state effort and
never got any traction on the issues related to
travel- demand and settlement-pattern Balance.
The
Region: An overwhelming problem was the
total failure to understanding where the
Washington-Baltimore New Urban Region is located
and who should be in control of which decisions.
There is plenty of value generated by a
functional shared-vehicle system connecting the
Centroid of the National Capital Subregion with
Washington-Dulles Airport via Tysons Corner and
Reston to pay for the project without help from
the feds (or the Commonwealth). However, if the
"region” is an economic, social and
physical reality but a political vacuum, that
potential goes out the window.
Washington
Dulles Airport: In the blog postings linked
to in End Note One, the
blogger known as Groveton, who has traveled by
air a lot more than we have recently, hits the
nail on the head: The Authority is incompetent
to do anything but spend too much money on the
wrong priorities. To be charitable, the
Authority is still in the '60s. The airport is
finally getting rid of the Funny Buses but board
members have yet to acknowledge that the 1973
OPEC oil embargo, 11 September 2001 and airline
deregulation have forever changed air travel.
The
Authority is building the best 1980s airport in
the world for unsustainable, early '70s air
traffic projections. If the Authority
wanted a shared-vehicle system to Dulles it
should have given the National Airport terminal
to the Air and Space Museum for its Annex and
used the value of the land under the National
airport runways to fund a shared-vehicle ground
transport system linking the Capitol with
Dulles.
The
Cheerleaders: The fans of Rail to Dulles,
led by the more than earnest Ken Plum and hard
working Patty Nicoson at the Dulles Corridor
Rail Association have turned themselves into
pretzels twisting and turning in an attempt to
keep everyone under a big tent. Even they could
not create a stable tent (or a golden spike) out
of conflicting and unrecycled trash.
Land
Owners and Developers: It is hard to blame
land owners and developers for doing what they
thought would make them the most money. That is
what they do for a living. Problem is they
overreached. They were the ones with the data
and insight to make Rail to Dulles happen but
could not see a way to make as much money by
doing it right. (See “Why
METRO-to-Tysons is a Mess,” 27 Dec
2007>)
Consultants
and “Investors”: Like the Land Owners
and Developers, they tried to make the pot
bigger, not the system better. They thought the
“public / private partnership” scam would
paper over the defects. It did not.
NIMBYs:
“We have ours, you need to get yours somewhere
else in a way that does not disturb us.” To
this day, they do not understand how
shared-vehicle systems reduce traffic congestion
by making the use of Autonomobiles unnecessary.
Municipal
“Leaders”: “Tell me what our biggest
contributors and the most vocal voters say they
want and we will shout that the loudest.”
Tunnelphiles:
Until the end they could have gotten everything
they wanted -- a Metro system that drove
redevelopment of Tysons Corner as a mixed-use,
pedestrian-oriented "downtown" for
Fairfax County -- without a tunnel. If fact
Tysons would work better without a tunnel.
Tunnelphiles insisted on a 1970s Arlington
“solution” to a fundamentally different
problem. They swayed many stakeholders who
stayed on the sidelines, undermining support for
an approach that could have vastly lowered the
cost and increased the value of the
shared-vehicle system. (See “All
Aboard!,” 16 April 2007, and “Why
METRO-to-Tysons is a Mess,” 27 Dec 2007.)
If they keep it up, they will short circuit even
the “no federal money” options.
WaPo:
Yes, WaPo is the fattest rat.
How
could anyone blame the Beta Region’s Flagship
MainStream Media outlet? Because those listed
above, and especially the general public, did
not have the information they needed to make
intelligent decisions. They did not have
this information for the reasons spelled out in
"The
Estates Matrix," 10 December 2007. (For
a brief summary of my argument, go to PART IV
“Postscript
- Lancasterization of Media.”)
WaPo's
25 January
story is pure "He Said, She Said"
Journalism. The editorial on the same day
(“Dulles Derailed: The feds have a lot of
explaining to do”) is more of the same. A 26
January story presents even more of the same.
The WaPo website tries to cover the
newspaper's tracks by suggesting that way back
in 2005 it did a major series on the problems
with METRO. This series is a perfect example of
the sort of coverage that is described in the
section “Credit Where Credit is Due” in PART
I of "THE ESTATES MATRIX." Not one of
the nineteen topics highlighted in the four-day
“problems with METRO” series deals with the
core METRO dysfunctions outlined in “It
is time to Fundamentally Rethink METRO and
Mobility in the National Capital Subregion,”
18 October 2004, [Add Link] Neither do any of
the other 11 stories for which links are
provided in the web-based “expanded
coverage” or the “Washington Post
Investigates” page.
By the way, when you
print out the problems with METRO page, a big ad
for Toyota Tundra trucks comes up. Please
read THE ESTATES MATRIX with care.
Is
Rail to Dulles Dead?
Only
time will tell but, as we have said thousand
times in a hundred different ways over the past
30 years, the real question is: (See End
Note Two.)
Will
the Households, Agencies, Enterprises and
Institutions have the resources left after
decades of profligate waste and the
agglomeration of grossly dysfunctional
human settlement patterns to create a Balance
between settlement pattern and mobility systems,
or will this Region become “Bangladesh on the
Potomac”?
A functional
shared-vehicle system link between the Centroid
of the National Capital Subregion and
Washington-Dulles International Airport would
provide a major boost to evolve functional
settlement patterns in the Subregion.
The
way forward has not changed over the past four
decades, except that we should all know more
about what will not work.
Jim
Bacon outlines some important options in the
blog post, "Rail
to Dulles: What Comes Next?" These,
however, are “policy options” -- not a
strategy or a plan.
Citizens
need to know what Rail to Tysons Corner, Reston and Dulles
would “look like,” how would it work and how
our lives would be better if it were built.
The
27 January WaPo coverage was a "go
out on the street and find some people who are
shocked" story to show how much the
newspaper "cares." ("The Dulles
Rail Death Knell: A Region Stunned at Loss of
Economic Engine Seeks to Salvage or Rethink
Project.") Had WaPo done an
acceptable job of being a Regional media outlet,
this never would have happened.
The
answer will fit on the back of an envelope when
everyone is ready to heed the call: “All
Aboard.”
--
January 28, 2008
End
Notes
(1).
Here is helpful background material for
understanding the context of the Federal Transit
Administration decision to deny federal funding
for the Rail-to-Dulles project:
There
are also recent postings on Bacon’s Rebellion
blog: “Rail
to Dulles is Dead, Give it a Pauper’s Burial”
and “Rail
to Dulles: What Comes Next?” which provide
additional insights. Earlier Bacon’s Rebellion
Blog links can be found in the above
columns.
(2).
The appropriate way to ask this question is
to play a video clip of the GM/Cadillac
advertisement with a sexy older bombshell in
short dress driving a red car in dim light
saying: “The real question is when you turn
your car on, does it return the favor."
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