VA House speaker Howell denounces Dulles Rail as wasteful, useless

Virginia House speaker William Howell says the Dulles Rail project proposed for the median of the Dulles Toll Road and Dulles Greenway is an "incredible waste of money" and may actually worsen traffic conditions in northern Virginia by encouraging higher density development. Future ownership of the Dulles Toll Road is at stake in the controversy over the $5 billion rail project.

The Kaine Administration in Richmond has signed a provisional agreement transferring control of the Toll Road to the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA) for 50 years in return for MWAA financing the capital cost responsibilities of local jurisdictions in any funding agreement with the Federal Transit Administration. The uncompeted grant of control of the tollroad to MWAA is conditional on FTA funding, and also gives MWAA unlimited powers over toll rates on the Dulles Toll Road.

State senator Ken Cuccinelli (Northern VA) calls the rail project a "boondoggle" and "never a transportation project from the very beginning."

Dulles Rail was designed as:

- a prestige builder for Dulles Airport and MWAA

- a works project for several companies that negotiated a so-called "public private partnership" lacking any equity investment, and as

- a real estate value enhancer by Tysons and other landowners wanting zoning approvals for higher density around proposed rail stations.

Product of "PR and lobbying campaign"

Cuccinelli says the rail project is a product of a huge PR and lobbying campaign by special interests.

He and Howell were responding this week to ill-advised remarks by the state Governor Timothy Kaine that people in Northern Virginia had "been clamoring for something like this forever."

People with checkbooks in hand perhaps?

Says Cuccinelli: "We should have pulled the plug on this project long ago, but better late than never."

FTA to reject local beg

Word now is that the Federal Transit Administration will likely not provide the $900m that sponsors have asked for Stage I of Dulles Rail. Unlike many other rail projects around the country there is no appetite in northern Virginia for levying a local sales tax to subsidize the project. Moreover the whole arrangement for having an airports authority - and one with a not very good reputation - run a tollroad and build a rail line which it won't operate - is odd.

And the arrangement is being challenged in the courts. The Kaine administration has no clear legislative authority to transfer the operations and revenues of the Dulles Toll Road to an airport authority which is controlled by three other governments (MD, DC, US).

There are other problems. The idea of Dulles Rail supporters is that the future stream of tollroad profits could support borrowing to fund state and county contributions. However there is no plan on how to fund operating losses.

Bus better

Analysis has repeatedly shown that better transit service at much lower cost can be provided in the Dulles Corridor by express bus, vans and other rubber tired vehicles in special roadway lanes. Such vehicles can provide door to door service, higher frequency and can run express, whereas the train will require elaborate feeder services at each end and will have some 20 stops between Dulles Airport and downtown DC, causing travel times to be much longer than in managed lanes.

The first stage of the rail project for which the federal government is contemplating the $900m grant does not even reach to the airport. It ends halfway between Tysons Corner and Sterling.

A rail line to similar sized Baltimore Washington Airport in Maryland on the other side of the metro area is almost totally unused except by a few airport workers. It at least has cheap grade crossings. Dulles Rail would be a full heavy metro project.

Those who argue that the rail project will worsen congestion reason that the selective zoning increases around the stations following rail will generate many more new car trips to and from those locations than trips that will be attracted to the train, exaccerbating road congestion.

More dispersed development makes traffic easier to handle.

Aborted private procurement

In proposing to hand control of the Dulles Toll Road to the airport authority the Kaine Administration aborted a private sector concession procurement midway through, an action which has jeopardized the credibility of its efforts to gain investment partners in tollroads.

ENDNOTE: A critique of the rail proposal for the Dulles Corridor was "Comparison of Bus and Rail Transit Modes for the Dulles Corrdior" by William Vincent (Breakthrough Technologies Institute) and Gabriel Roth (Civil Engineer and Transportation Economist) Transportation Research Board Paper 06-2396, 2006.  The paper was  also published by the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy under the title "Rail at Any Cost: Options that Could Provide Better Service than Dulles Rail at a Third of the Cost"

They found cost per new transit trip generated was $8 to $12 using express toll lanes or dedicated busway versus $26 to $34 for rail, concluding: "for the same budget as rail our analysis suggests that a high quality transit system could be built in the Dulles corridor and in several other corridors in Northern Virginia. This would attract many more people to transit, serve many more communities, and do more to relieve Northern Virginia's notorious traffic congestion."

Download the Vincent-Roth 22 page paper here as a pdf file. 

TOLLROADSnews 2007-12-05