VIRGINIA:Dulles Toll Road boomer

Not since the late-1930s and the Bureau of Public Roads’ (FHWA’s predecessor) attempt to sabotage the construction of the Pennsylvania Turnpike have there been traffic and revenue studies that so grossly underestimated the potential of a toll road. The 1979 “Dulles Toll Road Study” by JHK & Assoc, a company that was absorbed in the conglomerate now known as TransCore suggested the Dulles Toll Road would not need to grow beyond 2x2-lanes until after 2015 and that maintenance and operations expenses of the road should prudently be left to the taxpayers. (It’s now 2x4 lanes and a prolific moneyspinner after paying maintenance and ops for the state of Virginia.)

Tolls could be relied upon only to service the Dulles Toll Road debt, JHK said. Operations and maintenance should be paid out of VDOT’s general budget. They projected (Alt37 p117) 56k veh/weekday through the mainline toll plaza in the year 2000. That will turn out to be 60% low, since traffic this year is approaching 135k veh/weekday – 2.4 times that projected by JHK’s modeling for year 2000, the basis for the quite inadequate initial design of the road and unwarranted pessimism about its financial viability.

The present toll at just 50c for cars at the mainline plaza and 25c on the ramps was established in 1989. It generated $34.9m last year compared to JHK’s forecast of $9.6m (p162), almost four times that forecast! Operating costs last year of the DTR including toll collection were $13.5m for a profit before interest and depreciation of nearly $21.4m.

This road is sometimes called Internet Alley. Together with the 23km (14mi) investor-owned Dulles Greenway, which is its extension westward beyond the entrance to Dulles Airport, the 19.5km (12.2mi) 8-lane Dulles Toll Road is the main street of the world’s greatest concentration of internet businesses. America On Line, Network Solutions, UUNet, and other big internet businesses have their largest and corporate offices here.

Bill Costis, the toll road’s director works out of a glassy, if not very classy, single-story office building right alongside the main toll plaza. He says he counts the construction cranes along the toll road to get a rough sense of where traffic will be a year ahead. He says there as many cranes as ever.

Balanced flows AM & PM

DTR managers say that apart from rapid growth, the other striking change in the past few years has been the increasing peak hour balancing of traffic flows. There has been a much faster growth of jobs than of homes in the area served by the toll road. When the road was planned in the early 1980s its primary rationale was to provide a route for Fairfax County residents living in Reston and Herndon on either side of the toll road corridor to travel east in the mornings to jobs around or inside the Beltway. So in the 1980s there was heavy directionality in the traffic – eastbound mornings and westbound evenings. But job growth has since 1995 spread along the toll road itself, in the area of Dulles airport and along VA-28 and out into Loudoun county, all to the west of the DTR. As a result traffic is now almost completely balanced eastward and westward in the morning and evening peaks.

If employment growth in the corridor continues to exceed housing growth then westward travel on the DTR from DC and the Beltway could exceed traditional inbound morning travel.

The Dulles Toll Road (part of VA-267) starts 17km (11mi) west of the White House, just outside the Beltway (I-495) in the Tyson’s Corner area where it has connections eastward in to I-66 a 2x2-lane motorway which in turn links to Arlington county employment centers such as Rosslyn and the Pentagon and via the Roosevelt bridge to the District of Columbia.

The Dulles Toll Road (DTR) heads westward from the Tyson’s Corner area 20km (12mi) through Reston and Herndon ending at VA-28 on the eastern boundary of Dulles Airport. It has connections to north-south VA-28, to the northwest heading Dulles Greenway and to the airport entry roads. The DTR has 11 interchanges, supported by 17 ramp toll plazas and a mainline plaza at the far eastern end near Tysons Corner.

The mainline plaza has 15 toll lanes, seven in each direction plus a toll lane that is exclusively for traffic from Tysons Corner going west. Another 42 toll lanes are spread among the 17 ramp plazas. Total toll lanes are 57.

The toll road was built straddling an existing 2x2-lane Dulles Airport Access Road (DAAR) motorway owned by the Washington Airports Authority (formerly by the FAA.) DAAR was very deliberately built without off-ramps westbound and without on-ramps eastbound in order to prevent it being used as a commuter road serving the suburbs on either side of the road. Its owners were concerned it would immediately be clogged with commuters and cease to provide attractive free-flowing rides to the Airport. In the years before the toll road was opened Reston/Herndon commuters would play a game with the police on the DAAR, entering the toll road in the morning going west, heading out to the airport, do a U-turn using an airport diamond interchange, then head back east toward the Beltway and DC. This might triple the mileage of their trip. But it apparently saved time as compared to VA-7 (Leesburg Pike), a slow signalized arterial.

The toll road, built as 2x2-lanes, was an immediate success, and has been widened twice to 2x4-lanes. The inside lanes are HOV2.

Present plans are to expand capacity in the corridor with bus rapid transit in the median of the access road, as an interim step to rail. Rail enthusiasts want a heavy metro line there – estimated cost $1.6b! This would be a costly and cumbersome affair requiring long walks from central stations to expensive and time-consuming shuttle buses and park-&-rides. Then extra journeys at each trip end. Studies have shown the most cost-effective solution, by literally an order of magnitude, is express bus/HOV lanes with vehicles making use of reserved lanes for the line-haul but using T-ramps to get on and off the Dulles corridor. That way they would be able to pick up and drop off passengers somewhere near the ends of their journeys instead of being confined to operations in the middle of the 12-lane 4-carriageway road system.

The express bus/HOV approach also has the advantage of offering integration with HOV/managed lanes on other area motorways such as the Beltway (I-495) I-270, I-66, I-395, MD-210, and I-95.Toll buy-in to the HOV lanes could ensure they were better utilized. Interoperability of the Dulles and Maryland ET systems is not a technical issue. Both use identical Mark IV equipment. It is a matter of making business arrangements to swap good-tag files regularly and do needed financial clearing house operations.

The DTR could benefit from joining the Interagency Group for E-ZPass with an increasing number of E-ZPass tags appearing in Virginia.

DTR nearing capacity

The basic 8 travel lanes of the toll road do have adequate capacity at present with about 135k veh/day point flows. The TRB Highway Capacity Manual says that beyond 20k veh/day/lane (160k for 8-lanes) most motorways exhibit congestion for periods of the day, which suggests there is 15 to 20% growth before there will be straight mainline overcrowding.

The immediate challenge of DTR managers is to alleviate backups at the toll plazas. Electronic tolling (ET) has already helped.

Bill Costis, DTR manager, says that before ET in mid-1996 with less than 90k tolls/day there were mainline toll plaza backups in the evening rush hour that regularly extended 3km (2mi) back to the Beltway. The main plaza now processes 135k tolls/day with small backups, thanks to retrofitted slow-speed electronic tolling (ET). But backups are beginning to reappear.

Medium speed ET

The DTR managers hope to avert the growth of backups at the main plaza with a pair of medium speed (35mph) ET-only lanes. The toll booths, canopy and concrete islands have been removed from the lefthand two lanes each direction as part of the introduction of medium-speed ET, occuring now. The lanes will continue to be separated to prevent lane straddlers with flexible orange colored delineators. No change is planned to antennas and to lane controller software so lane-straddlers cannot be handled for the time being. Moreover the distances in the approach to the toll plaza and in the merge on the other side are such that it could be unsafe to operate the plaza at full highway speed. Longer distances would be needed plus Jersey barrier separations.

Under the medium-speech concept there will be no hard physical separation of ET from cash traffic, just the marker posts. 35mph signage seems likely to keep most traffic to 45mph or below.

Virtually all the ramp toll plazas on the DTR are to be rebuilt, Costis hopes, over the next five to ten years to add toll lanes, and in some cases an additional approach travel lane. Full highway speed tolling on the mainline might be an option beyond that, but it is a lower priority than the improvements to all the ramp plazas where there is major congestion.

The next major project at the DTR mainline plaza is an upgrade of its signage, which is very poor quality – small, dim, and hard to read.

Pricing

By most standards the cash toll on the DTR should be doubled – at least in peak hours – to perhaps $1 at the mainline plaza and 50c at the ramp plazas. The corridor is a perfect place for variable tolls and for encouragement of ET with a discount from the $1 cash toll. Travel time savings in rush hours are at least 20mins compared to parallel surface arterials, whereas they are less out of peak, making tolls of $1 a bargain.

Moreover the road would be expensive to widen further – especially if the central median space is wasted on a lavish line-haul transit system, as presently planned.

160k veh/day through the mainline plaza and 380k total tolls/day seem about the upper ceiling for the present 2x4-lanes. The road would probably top out at toll revenues of $65m to $90m toll revenue/year.

The best traffic relief for the corridor will be improvement of north-south routes, reducing the need for the U-shaped trips using the DTR. That means a Second Crossing of the Potomac, upgrades to VA-28 on the eastern fringe of Dulles airport and to the Fairfax County Parkway (presently a clumsy mix of motorway and signalized arterial) and, further out, a new US-15 or alternate to link north to I-70 in Frederick county.

LATE THOUGHT: The shine may well be coming off the internet boom right now, so traffic growth may take a breather for a year or two. Which is an argument for rethinking the whole lavish line-haul transit system approach.

HISTORY: Formally named the Omer L Hirst-Adelard L. Brault Expressway on state maps it is commonly known as the Dulles Airport Access/Dulles Toll Road and designated state route 267 (VA-267). The idea for the toll road is usually credited to a prominent developer Til Hazel, sometimes called the mayor of Tysons Corner. For years there had been battles between locals and the Federal Aviation Admin (later Washington Airports Authority.) From 1963 after Washington Dulles International Airport opened, its owner the FAA operated the Dulles Airport Access Rd, a beautiful free-flowing 2x2-lane motorway through their neighborhoods to which they had no legal access. Its ramps in Reston and Herndon were organized westside, for motorists going to Dulles airport, or coming from the airport. The locals wanted eastside ramps to go east to the Beltway and Wash DC, and to be able to get off near their homes when coming from there. The FAA dug their heels in, saying the Dulles Airport Access Road is for access to their airport, not for the convenience of local commuters near the airport. The FAA worried, with justification, that once commuters were allowed on the access road it would be swamped. It rejected proposals that a lane be added to the access road and commuters allowed on. The state had no money to build separate roadways. Developer Hazel suggested a toll road for local movement be built alongside the access road in the same right of way. VDOT, the FAA and local legislators ran with the idea. In 1979 the Virginia assembly authorized issue of $57m revenue bonds backed by the state to finance construction which was done 1982-84. The toll road was an immediate success and within 5 years there was a second bond issue of $34m to third-lane the pike, enlarge the main toll plaza and build a new overpass for VA-7 – built 1990-92. Fourth-laning for HOV and another new interchange (Wiehle Av) was the major reason for a third bond issue of $45m in 1996, which supported works completed by end-98. Actually $73m was spent on the 1996-8 project which involved much new soundwall, relocation of utilities and ETC, the balance being financed from operating surpluses.

FINANCES: The Dulles Toll Road being owned and operated by Virginia DOT has no annual reports or consolidated records since toll projects are not regarded as separate self-financing business entities, and their expenses and revenues are scattered through the department’s accounts. However commissioner for finance Tom Boyd and Brenda Madison, project finance manager, at VDOT kindly went through VDOT records to get us numbers which form the basis for the profit statement below. We express our gratitude.

The table here, however, is TRnl’s interpretation of the finances of the toll road, not the way VDOT presents it, which mixes interest earnings with toll revenues on the revenue side and capital spending with current on the outlays side. There is no depreciation estimate at all! Such cashbook accounting treats capital as some kind of disembodied manna from heaven, return on which is irrelevant, and the value of which is not to be measured to see how far capital is being preserved, enhanced or run down. Such cavalier approaches to capital stewardship rightly subject business management to risks of disbarment from stock exchanges, SEC prosecution, IRS investigations, investor law suits even criminal penalties but it remains standard within government so we don’t fault Boyd or Madison at VDOT. They are apparently following regular government accounting practices.

In the table the $2m for ops and maintenance in 1985 is simply our guess because for the first several years a single account entry apparently covered capital spending and ops & maintenance at the DTR. Interest earnings of the DTR varied wildly from year to year depending probably on the lag between construction costs and bond issues and the state of DTR bank balances and we have taken them out of the earnings column since a toll authority only earns tolls – it is not in the financial investment business – and netted them against debt service payments to get a surplus/deficit.

$136m debt has been issued in total for the DTR of which $56m has been paid off, leaving $80m outstanding. Total capital spending on the road has probably been about $250m since much capital spending has been paid for out of current revenues. From 1985, the year the DTR opened, through 2000 $217m has been spent on construction/improvements VDOT reports and approx $33m ($57m in bond issue, less 1985 capital spending) seems likely to have been spent before 1985.

Tolls are mostly 75c for cars (50c at the mainline plaza and 25c at a ramp plaza) but the maximum toll for a car is 85c (with a 35c ramp toll at Sully Rd, VA-28 or 10c collected by the abutting Dulles Greenway at their mainline plaza and remitted to VDOT.) That’s 4.4c/km or 7c/mi.

The DTR is one great toll road, though its full potential is not realized. Let no-one ever talk of shortage of money for roads in N Virginia. This could be privatized for $1 billion-plus. (Contact Bill Costis or John Jusevich DTR 703 383 2700, Tom Boyd VDOT 804 786 5128, Brenda Madison VDOT 804 786 6083)