New bench seating in a Metro railcar (photo: WMATA)

WMATA and Virginia officials are steaming ahead with schemes to improve and expand Metrorail. The headline news is unquestionably that Virginia officials favor a Tysons Corner subway instead of elevated tracks, and may delay the project to get a better deal. Officials recognize their decisions will influence the urbanism of an activity center that’s bigger than most metropolitan downtowns for decades, if not centuries to come, and that it’s worth relatively modest cost and time increases if it means a superior product. Congressional doomsayers see things differently. They fear fuzzy math from the federal accountants who determine transportation grants will make the tunnel proposal appear to have a lower efficiency rating, even though state and local sources have agreed to fund the tunnel themselves. A tunnel paid for by Virginia would result in a project that from the federal perspective moves more people but costs the same. For the federal government to balk at this point would represent the worst in bureaucratic absurdity, and confirm that major changes are needed to the federal funding process. For their part, Virginia officials are confident that one way or another, they’ll get the project built.

Less sexy, but no less important, is word that WMATA will begin running a new design of railcar, with fewer seats but more efficient standing room – a design likely to be implemented on at least some of the cars in the agency’s $277 million purchase of new rolling stock . Finally, as BeyondDC noted in the newsfeed yesterday, WMATA is beginning to wrap up its portal cover program with new canopies in Crystal City and Clarendon.