This area needs rapid transit to Dulles. Has needed it since 1963. Forty fucking years of plans and studies, and construction is finally set to start. And you kill it.
You useless piece of shit motherfuckers sucking at the tit of the oil and auto industries. I’d like to see you and you alone try to survive on an Earth that’s been rendered uninhabitable by climate change. Unfortunately, we’ll all have to live in it with you.
Go drink gasoline and lie in front of a speeding eighteen-wheeler.
What do you mean “needs”?
And if something like this can’t stand on it’s own without federal funding then it shouldn’t be done. If it’s economically feasible it shouldn’t need such heavy federal and state backing. Rails are extremely unbalanced when it comes to startup costs/maintenance verses ridership revenue. That thing’ll be sucking tax money to subsidize it out of the local economy for ever.
Unless you have some numbers that say otherwise I’m not going to be sympathetic to the OP.
Kind of like Dan Onorato and his Onorato tax on drinks and rental cars that is supposed to prop up PAT in Allegheny County?
I think these public transportation systems should have to stand on their own, not survive by adding taxes and forcing payment from people who don’t use them.
Somebody remind me to withhold pack the portion of the money that I pay for the Interstate Highway System when I’m doing my taxes.
I think it’s stupid to expect transit systems to survive without tax revenue. The government is suppossed to fund systems that get people where they need to go - that’s what we pay taxes for. In the past, transportation money has always gone to highways (interstate highway system, anyone?), but now it makes more sense to build mass transit - more efficient use of money per passenger, less carbon footprint, and a better idea for cities that are so dense that a 40-lane highway would still be clogged at rush hour.
That said, my cursory glance at this particular project suggests that it has been overtaken by special interest groups and should be scrapped. The money would be better spent on repairs for the existing D.C. Metro.
Yet there is enough money to replace “Mobile Lounges” (weirdly mutated buses) with a 1 Billion with a B subway system at Dulles.
The buses work fine. I don’t like them, but I don’t like most anything at most any airport.
The Europeans have the right idea. They see transit as an essential of life, and no more expect it to turn a profit than they expect sewers to, or street-lighting.
You don’t benefit at all from the extra people in work due to public transport? No public transport = hundreds of thousands / millions without cars can’t get to work.
Exactly. Whenever I commute to the office I always think that if even just 10% of the people took mass transit to work my drive would be so much easier.
You live in Wisconsin so you’re not that familiar with the DC area and its traffic.
Traffic around here SUCKS. Second only to the Los Angeles area - one cite. The Tyson’s Corner area (smack in the middle of the proposed Metro extension) is one of the worst in the DC area. There are tens of thousands of jobs along that corridor, and tens of thousands of residences along that corridor and ffurther out - commuters who would drive all the way into the close-in jobs, but with Metro being extended, would drive or take the bus to further-out park/ride lots or the Metro itself.
The jobs, and inhabitants, are essential to the economic well-being of the area, and to the operation of the Federal government itself - very few people can afford housing close enough in that current mass transit will do the job, so they live further out and drive.
If they don’t have mass transit, the government will have to build bigger roads. There’s one expense. More lost time and more air pollution, road rage, and generally shitty quality of life. All bad things.
Build the Metro extension and you’ve spurred economic development along it, and you’ve taken a significant number of cars off the road, improving the commute for everyone.
If there were no government support for mass transit, FAR more cars would be on the road. Or carless people would find it harder to get to work and sometimes not be able to take a job. Economic loss there. Employers (and the Feds are the major employers around here - either directly or by hiring contractors) would have a much harder time finding employees. So there’s another loss.
I personally expect and want my tax dollars to help fund transit. Even if I don’t use it at any given time (like now - my 35 minute commute would be 2 hours due to where I’m working and where I live), it benefits enough of my neighbors and colleagues that I feel it benefits the whole area.
We need to secede from Richmond, Mama Zappa. Hell, if West Virginia can do it, why not Northern Virginia. Then we would have money for such nice things as a working transportation system. And an extra Democrat state in the electoral college, but that’s none of the reason. Honest.
Hey - for all intents and purposes we are a completely separate state - culturally and economically - from the rest of the state. Unfortunately - WV left the main part of VA when we had a civil war and I think it’d take something similar for NoVA to be able to do the same. Richmond - despite NoVA practically being a separate country - realizes that we’re quite a cash cow for the rest of the state, and won’t be eager to let us go.
Are you signing up with me?
More seriously - I think issues like this are just going to get bigger and bigger over the years. We are essentially a separate state in so many ways. I don’t know what percentage of VA’s tax base is up here, but I bet it is pretty high.
And the cancellation of the Dulles Metro sucks. Fortunately I got out of work at just after 4 today - it still took 40 minutes to get home.
I’m still furious at whomever decided that it would be a good idea to build a major airport purportedly to serve Washington, DC, in an area that, to me, is basically the eastern stretches of West Virginia. I swear to God, Baltimore’s airport is more convenient. And I don’t have to fight traffic to get there thanks to the fact that the Federal government several generations ago decided to subsidize the laying of railroad tracks from DC to Baltimore (and all across the country) for the benefit of commerce and mankind.
As someone who has to use Dulles quite frequently, fuck that airport and everyone involved in making it continue to be so horribly difficult to get to and get around in via the “mobile lounges.” Fuck you all with an oleo strut.
Hell, it isn’t Richmond that is killing the extension but rather the Federal Government.
I have to disagree with Mama Zappa on one thing, there is housing relatively or in DC that is affordable, it is just in places that people don’t want to live.
The cost is incredibly high but if you look at what they’ve spent just on the mixing bowl, it doesn’t seem that out of line. Mixing bowl
Catsix, how do you feel about funding for highways? Should those be self funding? That would probably solve the congestion problem better than anything else that we could do.
Metro isn’t terribly convenient for me since my 30 minute commute would take 1 hour and I often need to drive to various places for my job. However, anything that causes there to be fewer idiots on the road is a good thing.
:dubious: I hope this was meant to be funny, because I’m laughing pretty hard. 
:dubious: That’s why it needs federal funding. And the test of a successful transit system is in how well it serves the transportation needs of the public, not whether it is “economically viable” in the sense of taking in more at the farebox than it costs to operate. (The only mass-transit system in the world that is economically viable in that sense is Hong Kong’s, I believe.) It’s just exactly like with paved streets and roads and freeways, street signs, traffic signals, traffic cops, traffic courts – the whole expensive public infrastructure necessary for automotive transportation. Nobody expects any of that to be profitable to the government; it’s something government spends money on, for the public good.
How does everything thing you buy get to the store? :rolleyes:
Hey, mass transit is something that happens to other people, right? I kill me, but almost no one else gets me. Still, I endeavor to persevere.
Mass transit is as legitimate a use of federal transportation funding as highways, but trying to justify it by the number of cars it takes off the road is the wrong way to go about it. You have to design and build something like this to improve the commute of the people who do use it, not the people who don’t. Otherwise, you wind up with an expensive boondoggle that serves nobody’s needs and that nobody uses.