Who is that caped man — the one twirling his handlebar moustache and emitting an evil laugh, mwa ha ha ha ha – at the suffering of Virginia commuters?
Why, it’s arch fiend William Howell — or at least the cartoon image of the House Speaker as penned by the editorialists at the Washington Post.
“To all appearances,” the Post writes, “Mr. Howell cares not a whit for Northern Virginia’s transportation nightmare.” He has “thumbed his nose” at federal funding for Metro, and has mindlessly “attacked” the Governor’s proposals to turn the Rail-to-Dulles project over to the unelected Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority. “In short, when Northern Virginia commuters, lawmakers and business leaders speak of a transportation crisis, their pleas fall on Mr. Howell’s deaf ears.”
I would respond this way: To all appearances, the Washington Post cares not a whit for either Northern Virginia’s commuters or its taxpayers. Its editorial writers want to raise taxes to perpetuate the same Business As Usual transportation and land use practices that have landed Northern Virginia in its current unsustainable predicament – tax and build, tax and build.
Where Howell is at least flexible enough to explore alternatives for improving mobility and access, the Washington Post is stuck on the same tired nostrums of the 1980s. To all appearances, its editorial writers have learned absolutely nothing in the past 20 years. To all appearances, they have shown absolutely no curiosity about any remedy not spoon fed to them by the tax-and-build lobby.
It’s not as if the Post has weighed the alternatives — building balanced communities, improving neighborhood connectivity, promoting telework, managing transportation demand, promoting shared ridership, implementing intelligent transportation systems, outsourcing maintenance — and found them wanting. The Post hasn’t evinced the slightest awareness that such alternatives even exist.
In addition to re-examining its sanctimonious attitude, the Post editorial writer might stop thumbing his nose at the facts. “Never mind,” he sneers, “that Virginia has not raised a new dime for transportation in 20 years.” Not one dime? Apparently, some $2 billion in revenues allocated from General Funds surpluses (in the current budget and proposed for the next) counts for nothing.
