News that the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority has signed the contract to build the Tysons Corner segment of the Silver Line is a big deal, and is justifiably dominating the local cycle of planning news. But if readers take a glance over to the left a bit and check out BeyondDC’s newsfeed, they might wonder where the story went.

It’s been a busy day. Normally we wouldn’t do this, but with so many stories hitting the papers at the same time, BeyondDC thought we’d recap a little here on the home page. In addition to the aforementioned Metro contract, a global warming report tells us Virginia could be a lot smaller a century from now, Maryland Governor O’Malley provided another subsidy for drivers but made up for it by reviving the Maryland Office of Smart Growth, developers and residents of White Flint came together for a Ballston-like master plan, McLean developers are trying to turn that town’s central collection of strip malls into a real town center, and last but not least, a 200-foot-tall tower was approved in downtown Silver Spring.

And it’s barely after noon.

Ever heard of automatic sensors that calculate the time it takes to drive a certain distance and which then ticket you if you’ve made the trip too quickly to have driven at a legal speed?

That’s one of many suggested improvements to the ICC design made by Michael Dresser in a recent op/ed for the Baltimore Sun. Dresser makes a lot of the same mistakes made by most conventional traffic commentators. He believes something other than road design is responsible for driver speeds, for example, and he takes as gospel the entirely unproven assumption that tolling a highway can free it from congestion. He also fails to see any connection between transportation and land use and thinks environmentalists concerned with regional sprawl issues will be placated by speed enforcement on the highway. But nevertheless, Dresser is thinking outside the box and in this era where we are reevaluating long-held assumptions about how regional transportation works, his is a piece worth reading.

For BeyondDC’s part, we never have any problem with charging folks to use roads and making sure they do so legally. Every highway should be a toll road, in our opinion. But we also understand the difference between a symptom and a cause. Charging to drive and enforcing speed limits are all well and good, but do nothing to address the root causes of congestion or road danger.