How to (Marginally) Fix Dulles
The whole debt-ceiling imbroglio is being resolved at last, so hopefully we can all get back to debating the national issues that matter the most. Issues like improving the municipal infrastructure of the richest counties in the United States.
To be specific: David wrote recently about his frustration with Northern Virginia not agreeing to spend a few extra hundred million dollars to make Dulles Airport slightly less horrible for Washingtonians than it currently is.
It’s hard to be objective about Dulles Airport when, like me, you’ve lived very nearly next door to it since you were five years old. Its location may be inconvenient to those who live in the city but it’s been awfully convenient to me, and isn’t that what matters?
(Also, Dulles has in fact put a lot of time and effort over my lifetime trying to get better despite itself. The hideous “mobile lounges” that ferried passengers at 2.3 miles an hour to midfield are mostly gone and replaced with state-of-the-art trains. Also… well, that’s all I can name, but still.)
26 miles is indeed a long way to get to the closest massive international airport, though. If you are a Washingtonian and need someone to blame for that, blame Dwight David Eisenhower, who personally chose the location in 1958, over the top of Willard, Virginia (which now exists only as the name of a road). Keep in mind that Dulles was chartered by an act of Congress in 1950. It’s not easy to pick a location for an airport.
So, why won’t Northern Virginia be nice and agree to send Metro underground and into the terminal? Simple: In 2008, Democratic Governor Tim Kaine agreed to transfer authority over the Dulles Toll Road, one of the most important and expensive roads in the area, from the Virginia Department of Transportation to the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA), in exchange for their agreement to build rail out to Dulles Airport. And how would they fund such a thing? By taking future toll hikes, and via the magic of the bond market, teleporting the money into the present.
Simple! Except the politics of doing that are pretty nasty. MWAA is essentially funding the convenience of people who live in the city with the cash money of daily commuters who live in the suburbs. They can only keep that kind of deal going up to a point. That point happened to be two hundred yards from the Dulles terminal.
Is there any way out of this? Sure. I’d do two things: First, I’d have the MWAA sell the Toll Road to the private company that owns the Greenway, the even more expensive toll road that goes from the airport to Leesburg (full disclosure: I live in Leesburg and think that the rates for the Toll Road would go up and the rates for the Greenway would go down, at least temporarily, if that were to happen). Secondly, I’d make sure that current plans allow for the future possibility of having one stop outside the terminal, and one stop inside — and, if the inside stop were ever to happen I’d charge a usurious exit fare for that inside stop. Who would possibly oppose that?
MWAA can only do so much, of course: Dulles will still sit where it sits, and people will continue to curse the incorrect name as they make the trek down the Access Road. To solve that problem, we can do what Bob Dole suggested in 1990 and change the name to Eisenhower International Airport. Whether he suggested the change to honor one of the great men of the 20th century, as a wry commentary on a perennial Washington complaint, or both, I’ll leave that determination up to you.
