Gosh, what a surprise! The yet to be completed 23-mile extension of the Metro rail line to Dulles airport is already confronting serious financial difficulties. Added to the money problems are a series of lapses in management’s performance and the revelation that flaws in the system’s design will discourage ridership and further diminish its currently projected marginal contribution to regional mobility. In response, the system’s manager – the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA) – is seeking bailouts from the state of Virginia and from the federal government.
A Project Doomed to Fail. The only surprise in all of this is that the many people in charge of overseeing the project are surprised and disappointed by these revelations: As the record reveals, the mediocre performance of the system was predicted by the project’s own justification report submitted to the federal government in 20041, and recognized by the leadership of the United States Department of Transportation (USDOT) during the Bush Administration who refused to fund the project until beaten into submission by Congress.
Consider the key findings of WMAA’s 2004 report to USDOT:
- By the project’s completion in 2025, traffic volumes on the ten highway links in the corridor would be reduced by only 1.5 percent compared to levels that would occur without the extension.
- This negligible gain in traffic relief would be erased by 2027, given projected trafficgrowth rates. In effect, an estimated $6 billion (in current dollars) would be spent for two years of trivial traffic relief.
- As a consequence, net energy saving by 2025 (measured in energy saver per BTU, as car usage declines and transit usage rises) would be 0.5 percent for the full 23 mile project,while the Phase I (to Reston’s Wiehle Avenue) link of 11.7 miles of track would actually increase energy usage.
Importantly, given the new automobile mileage standards since adopted, and the proposed 54.5-mpg requirement, this projected energy savings may already have turned into a loss. Again, keep in mind that the data in the above three bullet points were provided by consultants to MWAA and submitted by them to the Federal Transit Administration (FTA). To put this in perspective, the Heritage Foundation estimated that the cost per new rider attracted from a car
(daily rider annualized) exceeds $15,000. That is enough to lease each new Dulles rail transit rider two BMW 328i convertibles for life and still return a few thousand dollars back to the taxpayer. By this measure, the Dulles extension would be one of the most expensive new transit projects ever conceived. Read full essay.
Ronald D. Utt is the Herbert and Joyce Morgan Senior Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation. This essay is being published simultaneously by Bacon’s Rebellion and The Score Radio Network.