No, BeyondDC has not gone suddenly libertarian. We have to ask, however, because in killing the Tysons Corner subway, the federal government has reached a new low in bureaucratic absurdity. It goes like this: The federal government, in determining which transit projects to fund, has a complicated series of formulas involving project cost and projected ridership that ultimately result in a “go/no-go” grant recommendation. Metro being a whole helluva lot more expensive than light rail, the original elevated line through Tysons Corner just barely met “go” standards. The proposal to tunnel through Tysons raised the cost of the project just enough to push it over into the “no-go” category. Here’s the bit that’s absurd: The federal government wasn’t asked to cover a single dime of the increased cost. Locals in the Tysons area were going to pay for it themselves. If the federal standards were sophisticated enough to take local funding mechanisms into account, the number crunchers would have realized that for the exact same cost to the government, they would get a better project with higher ridership; that is, a more efficient transit line, not a less efficient one. But the federal government, it seems, doesn’t think. It merely plugs numbers into predetermined formulas without activating a single brain cell in the process. What a shame.
September 7th, 2006 | Permalink
 |
Media 
 
Tweets by @beyonddc
Follow @beyonddc
Site
Partners
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
