Turning over the Toll Road to MWAA will be a disaster for local businesses and bad for the airport

Pierce: 

We hear rumors that you are about to turn over to MWAA, for no consideration, by some executive order sleight of hand, the valuable asset of the Dulles Toll Road, which has already been paid for many times over, and for which there is no excuse for further tolling. 

The Dulles Corridor is now the #1 business destination in Virginia, outranking Tysons in every category except shopping malls, and far ahead of other areas. It is also the most active, with2 million square feet of speculative office construction under way. 

We have no confidence that MWAA will improve the lot of business users. To the contrary, every published map shows service level F happening soon- COG's map, NVTC's map, and the forecasts as part of the Dulles Rail FEIS. 

Putting peak hour traffic on four lanes (48 feet) of a 400 foot right of way hemmed in by sound walls and Jersey barriers, with inadequate shoulders for incident management, is a monument to stupidity. 

Good ground access from Dulles to the core will require the replanning of the Toll Road section, the Connector and its intersection with I-66 (where five lanes merge into two) and the addition of extra lanes on I-66. MWAA has no jurisdiction, and no mandate, to do this. 

It is possible to get from the three New York airports to Manhattan in about 35 minutes on the ground, since they have managed lanes on their freeways. This is not done by the Port Authority, however. The Long Island Expressway, and the New Jersey Turnpike, are run by experienced road people. The rail links, on which they spent $1.8 billion apiece, are on separate rights of way. They have not attracted much patronage. Rail at Dulles is projected, even by the promoters, as the least used of all the stops in the system. For this we are spending more money than doubling the capacity of the Panama Canal? 

Getting into DC from Dulles takes a hour or so, worse during rush hour. How does MWAA propose to solve this problem? This rail boondoggle won't make the trip any faster. 

From Boston's Logan to South Station takes about ten minutes on their Silver Line airport bus. 

From BWI to Baltimore is a breeze with a wealth of different freeway options. 

Who is going to build capacity for the 150-200,000 cars a day that are expected to use 606 and 28 in the near future? MWAA? 

The bottom line is that the business community, at least those not on the rail payroll, is not going to put up with an end run around the public process. The future of the Dulles Corridor should be decided by referendum in Loudoun and Fairfax Counties. 80% of the lifetime cost of rail will be paid locally. Failing that, it needs to be decided by the Legislature. This is the process used to approve mega projects almost everywhere in the US.

Kaine's transportation program seems to be to raise taxes, waste the money, and offer no congestion relief. It's no wonder this program didn't sell with the General Assembly. 

If the Governor is still open to a rational discussion on this issue, please let us know. If not, we are gearing up to file three separate lawsuits challenging various aspects of the Toll Road/Rail project. I would hope we could avoid this expensive, and time consuming process. 

Let me know if there is any hope that we can avoid the Rape of the Dulles Corridor with a rational, 21st century highway, which would involve tearing down the toll plazas on the outer lanes, and building extra capacity in the form of congestion managed lanes in the center, free to airport users. Why don't you get some outside advice on how to build a state of the art ground access system? The current design long ago outlived its usefulness. 

This is not the time to abandon your responsibility to offer congestion relief to long-suffering residents, by turning the whole mess over to an unelected, inexperienced bureaucracy that hasn't even shown the ability to run Dulles Airport well (according to JD Power surveys). 

Chris Walker

---  This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it Phone:703-758-3807; Fax:703-648-9344; 12007 Sunrise Valley Drive, S. 400 Reston, VA 20191. Sites I maintain: cwalker.com (personal), qualityoutdoorlighting.com (environ.), dullescorridorusersgroup.org, Rt50.org (mobility), exsys.org (fitness).

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