Gentle Reader -- You are welcome to peruse my web-based journal. I assure you that my contributions to this medium will be both infrequent and inconsequential. Read on!

IN MY COUNTRY THERE IS PROBLEM . . .

and that problem is transport.

(Some background: There are two airports in Northern Virginia, one small and close in -- Reagan -- and one big and far out -- Dulles. Flying into/out of Reagan is more convenient and more expensive, and those two things are probably related. A cab ride from my house to Reagan is $15-20. A cab ride to Dulles is $85. Dulles is much less useful to the area than it might be because it's really hard to get there and back.)

Federal officials remain skeptical of the plan to extend Metrorail to Dulles International Airport and might reject it, even though their consultants recently found that the proposal meets requirements for full funding, government and project sources said.

Officials with the Federal Transit Administration say they are concerned about the
price tag and the specter of another Big Dig, the Boston project built by the same contractor in charge of the Dulles rail line, which took years longer and cost millions more than planned, according to the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the negotiations are sensitive. In addition, the agency has been reluctant to promote large-scale transit projects.

That last line is the key, apparently. DOT: "It's not that this project doesn't meet any of the criteria we came up with, or that you haven't changed it in accordance with all the requests we've made, or that you didn't trim the budget the way we asked. It's just that we don't like public transit, and we don't want to do it. Even more than that, all the things we asked you to do with this project were just a smokescreen. We took advantage of your mistaken impression that this project might ever happen."

State and local officials, as well as project advocates, say they are ready to
meet any requests by the federal government. Officials slashed $300 million from
the budget in September. The project is to link the region's major
international and transcontinental airport to the rest of the transportation
network and help remake Tysons Corner. But without the more than $900 million in federal funding requested by Virginia, the plan would collapse.

Nine hundred million sounds like a lot, doesn't t it? Not according to Tim Kaine, Governor of Virginia:

"We can see no reason why the project would be rejected at this point," Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D) said during a question-and-answer session yesterday on washingtonpost.com. "Under normal conditions, communities often put up 20 to 30 percent of the costs of these transit projects with the federal government picking up the remaining share. In this instance, the local share is more than two-thirds, and Congress has already demonstrated that this is a project of national importance by allocating significant budgetary resources."

Putting aside the fact that Tyson's corner is a regional business center, and that it might be nice to be able to, say, get into the city without having to sit in out crippling gridlock for a couple of hours (to go 15 miles), not to mention alleviating some of said crippling gridlock by having some light rail. It's not that it's not too expensive, it's not that it wouldn't work, it's not that anyone in the affected areas isn't in favor of it -- it's just that the Bush people don't like the idea. And they don't need any reasons.

Reasons are for people who aren't 100% sure that they are right. posted by Carlton at 6:37 PM