The costs of sprawl keep rising -- if you live there, you'll pay them

Have fun with this:


View Larger Map


Where is it? Over Virginia way (where they just elected Cro-Magnon Bob McDonnell governor, and Neanderthal Ken Cuccinelli Attorney General) -- good luck with that, and certainly this is absolutely unmitigably bad, terrible news for any progress from the Virginia side on improving the health of the Chesapeake Bay), there are apparently complaints that the tolls on the Dulles Toll Road (also misnomered the Dulles "Greenway") are going to go up to pay for the expansion of the Washington Metro system to Dulles Airport. It's a short stretch of road, and it's going to cost $2.25 to travel most of the length of it in about two years. People who regularly drive on the road are complaining.

Too damn bad.

I've been to enought airports in my life to know that linking the local city to the airport by rail is convenient for travelers. Examples I've seen personally: Chicago*, Portland, Baltimore, Paris (Charles de Gaulle, not Orly), Frankfurt, and Hong Kong. It's a whole lot better than bus or taxi. *Note on Chicago: it helps to have a political-machine run city to get things like this done, regardless of cost, especially when part of the cost is paying political cronies to keep the machine running.


The Dulles Rail project does two things: links the sprawling suburbs to both the city and job-hub Tysons Corner, and also links the airport to downtown D.C. When finally finished, this will make Dulles a much more logical place to fly into, and out of, D.C. than (urp: sorry, indigestion) Reagan National, especially for international flights that don't fly into Reagan National. And given where the jobs are, the rail project here does make a lot of sense. But it's going to cost a lot of money, and if people chose to live where they have to connect the rail to make things a bit less worse, then they foot the bill. They chose to do that by choosing where they live and exacerbating the current situation.

So the Dulles Rail project is a logical response to the sprawl problem in NoVA that the Toll Road commuters epitomize. They think that they shouldn't have to pay because they probably won't ride the rails when they're running. But every mile they put on the roads slows down other people currently driving who WILL ride the train when they can. So they are paying for the convenience of a better driving commute because other people won't be in their cars driving and slowing them down. See?

I put the map up to show the contrast between the NoVA side and the Maryland side in western Montgomery County, which is a rural/agricultural reserve. There were brief and unsuccessful talks many years ago about trying to find a place to put in a new Potomac Bridge between the Washington Beltway bridge and the Point of Rocks bridge north of Leesburg, partly because a lot of MOntgomerians (as well as Prince Georgians, and even a few Calvertians, though more of them go south over the Wilson Bridge) commute to NoVA to work. But when you look at this view from space, its obvious that won't happen, because it would tear right through the reserve and open it up to the type of sprawl on the other side of the river. So to its credit, sort of, Maryland still has a few places resistant to sprawl:

Even thought "Smart Growth" really isn't working in Maryland -- take your pick:

Our View: Smart Growth defeated by compromise


Smart Growth incentives fail to rein in suburban sprawl


Study calls Md. smart growth a flop

Actual study that described all this: Managing Growth With Priority Funding Areas: A Good Idea Whose Time Has Yet to Come
(if not now, WHEN?)

Not much we can do about that, either, until collectively we decide that business-as-usual is unacceptable. We're pretty far down the line towards "too late" for that to happen and have an appreciable effect.


And some more not-so-good news about the Chesapeake Bay.