A public hearing held tonight by the Fairfax Board of Supervisors is the panel’s last big opportunity to hear from taxpayers prior to its June 7th vote whether to approve construction of Dulles Rail Phase 2. However, the project’s final Environmental Impact Statement is eight years old, and economic conditions have changed dramatically since 2004. Before making a decision of such magnitude, supervisors must publicly release updated figures on ridership, revenue and operating subsidies. That’s even more essential now that county taxpayers are on the hook to build parking garages and a Metro station at Route 28. Those costs, transferred to the county to make Phase 2 appear less expensive, were not part of the original deal.
If the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, or the Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation have such updated figures, they haven’t released them to the public. Nor have any of these government or quasi-governmental entities ever held a public hearing on the project’s rickety financing structure. Fairfax supervisors must now question all of the underlying assumptions made in preparing cost projections to extend Metrorail to Washington Dulles International Airport, currently estimated at $2.8 billion.
What little we do know is that the enormous capital costs are dwarfed by the costs of financing, bringing the total price tag to an eye-popping $14.8 billion over the next 50 years, according to an independent study released by the Reston Citizens Association, even though population densities in the Dulles Corridor are not high enough to support heavy rail.
MWAA, which is managing the project, expects to recover 75 percent of the total costs from drivers on the Dulles Toll Road. But MWAA’S own transportation consulting firm predicts that there will be 18 million fewer transactions when tolls double next year. This toll-avoidance behavior not only threatens the financial viability of the entire project, it will also divert some 25,000 vehicles per day to local roads, none of which are equipped to handle the extra volume. And that 25,000 is more than twice the 10,000 new riders the Federal Transit Administration expects will shift from autos to the Silver Line.
Besides sticking Fairfax taxpayers with construction costs of a new station and parking garages in addition to escalating tolls and higher Metro operating subsidies, MWAA’s own consultants admit that Phase 2 will worsen traffic in Fairfax County. Supervisors must now publicly explain how a project that didn’t make economic sense back in 2004 is a good idea in 2012.
