Good news! It’s not just the Triangle that can’t get Federal money to build commuter rail.
According to the Washington Post, the Department of Transportation has balked at providing $900 million for the $5 billion project extending Metro service through Tysons Corner to Dulles Airport.
“The sheer number and magnitude of the current project’s technical, financial and institutional risks and uncertainties are unprecedented,” [Federal Transit Administration chief James S.] Simpson wrote…
Simpson’s letter raised issues that go to the core of the project. They include its cost, which has ballooned over years of planning; the ability of the airports authority to manage such a large transit construction project when it has never done so; and the ability of Metro to absorb the extension into an existing system that is underfunded and needs repairs.
Somehow backers of the rail extension thought it would provide another “emergency evacuation route west,” although I’m not sure what plans were in place to get people from the last station on the line.
