The Dulles Metro station isn’t the problem. The Toll Road increases are.

At last, Northern Virginia’s elected officials have gotten what they wanted. The Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority has acceded to U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood’s request to change the original Dulles Metrorail project alignment — an alignment agreed to just four years ago by all parties — and to build an inferior station at Dulles International Airport. Unfortunately, getting what they wanted won’t fix the real problem facing Northern Virginians.

That’s because the problem confronting Dulles Metrorail is not the project’s cost but high tolls. As the airports authority has repeatedly demonstrated, a world-class underground station at Dulles would increase the cost of using the Dulles Toll Road by no more than 10 percent. Irrespective of which airport station is built, Dulles Toll Road drivers will be paying a double-digit toll for a trip less than a decade after Dulles Metrorail is completed.

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Under the current funding plan, almost 100 percent of the cost of Phase 2 of the Dulles Metrorail project is to be paid from local sources: one-fourth from Fairfax and Loudoun counties and the airports authority, and three-fourths from Dulles Toll Road revenue. There is no state grant assistance. There is no federal grant assistance.

No other transit megaproject in the United States is 100 percent locally funded. In fact, most have combined state and federal assistance of at least one-third of costs.

It should hardly be a shock, then, that the tolls needed to support Dulles Metrorail will be eye-popping. To be sure, the secretary’s process, by reducing Phase 2 costs (and shifting $400 million of costs to Fairfax and Loudoun), will have some mitigating effect on tolls. But even at the $2.8 billion cost the secretary has found acceptable, today’s $2 toll is projected to be $13 in 20 years, $17 in 30 years.

Though tolls are the real issue, the discussions in the secretary’s conference room focused almost exclusively on project costs, and particularly on the Dulles station. The Dulles underground station has made for great political theater — big dollar number, easy to understand, easy to ridicule.

But now the time for political theater is over, and it’s time to build the project — and squarely and honestly address the problem of high tolls.

The cost reduction and cost-shifting directed by the secretary was a valuable first step in controlling toll increases — but it was only a first step. What Dulles Metrorail needs now is meaningful participation by the U.S. Department of Transportation and by Virginia.

The airports authority has requested a substantial loan from DOT’s Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (TIFIA) program, which would have a profound effect on toll rates. The popular program is oversubscribed, so the competition for TIFIA loans is fierce. But the airports authority has offered to pay the “credit subsidy” — a cost akin to a mortgage origination fee that is normally picked up by the federal government — so that its request could be granted without crowding out other worthy applicants. In the past, the department has accepted such payments from TIFIA borrowers, but it has refused the airports authority’s offer.