Dan Tangherlini and WMATA planning and DC planning

Metro suggestion sign featuring Dan Tangherlini.

If you read the Post article, "Fenty to Name Interim Manager Of Metro as D.C. Administrator," about Dan Tangherlini agreeing to leave WMATA and become the DC City Administrator there are two things to get out of it:

1. DC will benefit from having a creative administrator who pushes the envelope. As one DC DOT upper level official once said to me, "Dan would say this is what we're going to do, and we'd have to run like hell to keep up with him, and to make it happen, despite all the bureaucratic obstacles in the way."

2. While I used to think that Chris Zimmerman was next to Godhead in terms of transportation planning (he is an appointee from Arlington), I am not so sure these days.

DC is the core of the region, and the center for the transit system. But at the heart, the transit system is about transit. Reservations expressed in the article that Tangherlini would be too DC-focused shows a failure to appreciate and understand that the WMATA system is in fact a system.

Virginia is going it alone on planning the Dulles extension. And therefore, decisions are being made in a vacuum, disconnected from broader concerns about how to continually expand and improve the overall system.



For example, a Dulles Extension will stress capacity in the Rosslyn Tunnel, which is already experiencing capacity issues.

Yet the planning for Dulles isn't really taking this into account, and isn't offering to include the cost of expanding tunnel capacity.

From the article:

Some Metro board members representing Maryland and the District wanted to appoint him to the top position earlier this year and forgo a time-consuming national search. But Virginia officials balked because they thought Tangherlini would be too focused on District issues and would not give enough attention to the proposed Metrorail extension to Dulles International Airport. "I think we have to take the blame on this one," said Metro board Vice Chairman Charles Deegan, who represents Maryland. "We could have had Dan if our Virginia colleagues had been more cooperative."

Chris Zimmerman, who represents Virginia, said it was important that the board take the time to "follow through on a proper search to decide who is going to run an agency with a $1 billion budget, 10,000 employees and more than a million riders every day."

Were the transportation planners for the Dulles extension part of WMATA, then they might think about how to make the Extension an express service from the Falls Church Metro Station to Downtown.

They might think about creating a new station as a terminus--between Farragut North and Farragut West, as a way to connect the Red Line to the Blue and Orange Lines.

And in DC, the line could go back to providing service to every stop.

But if extended eastward beyond the Farragut Square area, this could be the way to put back on the table the WMATA plan from 2002-2003 to add capacity in the Center City (which we all know is necessary) by creating that separate in-city Blue Line that was suggested.

But thanks to the hermetic and ideological transportation planning in Virginia, the rest of the region, in particular DC, is getting screwed.

And once you build, you aren't going to incrementally improve it. You're done. It's a massive engineering project that won't be augmented.

You only have one shot to do it right.

Which Virginia is screwing up in so many many many many ways. Along with encouragement from very narrow-minded Congressmen Davis and Wolf.

So who the hell is Chris Zimmerman to be talking about the over-focus on DC, when as a Virginia-based public official, he is one of the many people responsible for the overall WMATA system being under-developed and screwed by Virignia's go-it-alone policy?

"Metro Construction Projects Creak to Halt; Economic, Political Changes Cancel Expansion Plans, Spur Job Cuts, Early Retirements," Lyndsey Layton. Washington Post, July 13, 2003. pg. C.01. (I can't find this story online.) From the article:

Metro headquarters pulsed with big plans. P. Takis Salpeas, the head of construction, was swimming in fresh designs: rail to Tysons and Dulles, a Purple Line that would circle the city, a rail line over the new Woodrow Wilson Bridge, a new subway line through downtown that would finally bring Metro to Georgetown and release the railroad's choke points.That was two years ago.

Today, those plans have largely evaporated, victims of a soured economy and fractured local politics. Metro is not building the next generation of transit -- it is barely able to run its existing system. As construction money dwindles from the current fiscal year through fiscal 2009, Metro's stable of well-regarded architects, engineers and construction managers will be cut from 237 to 23.

Index Keywords: good-government; transit