Speaking of political leadership

House Government Affairs Committee Chairman Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., second from left, meets with Gary McCollum, vice president and regional manager Cox Cable of northern Virginia, right, and Comcast Executive Vice President David Cohen, second from right, prior to the House Government Reform Committee hearing on Capitol Hill Friday, April 7, 2006 to discuss broadcasting Washington Nationals baseball games. Baltimore Orioles Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Peter Angelos is at left. (AP Photo/Dennis Cook)

Something I wrote in a comment last week concerned Tom Davis mostly, but also Frank Wolf, both Congressmen in Northern Virginia, about the Tysons Corner subway proposal. The Federal Transit Administration scores proposals based primarily on total cost, regardless of the amount and percentage of the federally-provided share.

This is flawed, because quality of the project and reasons for cost differentials aren't considered. Tunnels cost more than surface-based transit. In the Tysons Corner area, for urban design reasons, underground service makes more sense.

Now as I said before, from my "DC first" standpoint, whatever. It's great for DC as long as mobility is difficult in Northern Virginia, because it provides more reasons to live and do business in the District of Columbia.

But more importantly, it demonstrates how bankrupt political leadership can be in Congress especially. The thing with Davis is a on the one hand this, on the other hand that... He has demonstrated leadership on providing additional funds to WMATA, and he is taking a lot of heat from the right on this--which is likening the funding to "the largest earmark in history."

But why aren't Congressmen Davis and Wolf, and Davis has a great forum as the chair of the House Government Operations Committee, which has oversight responsibility too..., and holding hearings on the FTA funding methodologies, which are clearly flawed, instead of strongly "encouraging" the State of Virginia to go along and submit a project congruent with FTA preferences, but ultimately flawed.

Similarly, I think Congressman Davis should have used his standing as chair of the House Government Operations Committee to raise the issue of how professional sports leagues pressure municipalities for great sums of money to build stadiums and arenas.

In Washington, instead of calling attention to this face, his focus was on the controversy between Comcast, the local cable company, and the Baltimore Orioles-controlled sports network and how this limited local broadcast of Washington Nationals baseball games.

In the great scheme of things, who cares about whether or not you can watch a baseball team on tv? But cities, counties, and states providing billions of dollars to rich people so that they only become richer, well isn't that something that Congress should be concerned about?

Today's Post has some good letters to the editor about the Tysons Corner issue and the failure of political leadership. See "The End of the Tysons Corner Tunnel." (The third letter isn't very good. It suggests running the subway down the Dulles Access Road. But that's not where people and potential riders are in a substantive way, and it certainly wouldn't seed urban design-related growth and compact development.) As Roy Schneider of Frostburg, Maryland wrote:

This is indeed a 100-year decision. In both a practical and economic sense, the best option was a tunnel. Forget aesthetics or whether Tysons will ever be an urban setting with a city-style grid of streets. The time lost by motorists caught in congestion during construction, the added pollution from gridlocked cars and the revenue lost by businesses on the route will be much more than the added cost of a tunnel. And any condos that might have been planned definitely will not be built facing the tracks.

Furthermore, an elevated track requires the loss of the median on both roads, land that might have been used for an additional lane. And the stations, because of the topography, will be almost four stories high. Commuters who don't wish to get on a virtual Stairmaster to get to work will stay in their single-occupant cars.
Image from the Dulles Metro project via the Washington Post.

Index Keywords: transit