All Aboard Kaine's Dulles Metro Plan

The Washington region needs to get behind the decision of Virginia's Gov. Timothy M. Kaine this week to accept a proposal from the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority that it assume control of the Dulles Toll Road and take the lead in extending Metrorail to Dulles International Airport and beyond.

The biggest benefit of this plan is that it would prevent the downstate Republicans who control the Virginia legislature from getting their mitts on the $45 million a year that Northern Virginia commuters now drop into the toll boxes on the Dulles Toll Road. Republicans had hoped to "privatize" the toll road by leasing it to a private company that would pay as much as $1 billion upfront for the right to collect and keep that toll revenue for the next 50 years. Right now, those tolls are used exclusively for the toll road, or the Metro extension. But under any of several privatization schemes, that $1 billion would be available to the legislature for any purpose it desired. Why else do you think Virginia House Speaker William J. Howell was so unhappy with the deal?

The second big benefit to the governor's plan is that it would get the Dulles extension project done quicker and cheaper. How? By putting it in the hands of an agency with a track record managing big construction projects, with its own source of revenue and bonding authority.

Right now, the project is being managed by a state agency that has no project experience, along with a consortium of private firms whose lead partner, Bechtel, is best known for having grossly mismanaged the Big Dig in Boston, and whose local partner, the West Group, had so many conflicts of interest it was forced to withdraw. Although this much-ballyhooed "public-private partnership" has already spent about $100 million, it still hasn't settled on a design for the first phase, produced a reliable cost estimate or come up with a credible financing scheme for completing the second phase of the project. And even in the most favorable circumstances, the current timetable doesn't envision completion of the project much before 2015.

No doubt about it: There are risks and trade-offs involved with the governor's toll road plan.

One way it would get the project done quickly is by entrusting it to an unelected board that wouldn't be as easily pushed around by every neighborhood group with a gripe or special interest group with an ax to grind. A little less democracy may turn out to be a good thing in this case. There would still be enough checks and balances built into the system that the airports authority would not be able to ignore the legitimate demands of the governor, the various county boards of supervisors or the Metro system.

Under the governor's plan, Virginia would also be also likely to forfeit any hope of getting $1 billion from the federal government for the second half of the project. That's nothing to sneeze at. But given the formulas used by feds to evaluate such projects, the odds of getting the money were never good. And with construction costs rising 10 percent a year, it's not clear that it is worth waiting seven more years just to get an answer.

Yes, it's probably unfair that, under the governor's plan, toll road commuters would wind up paying about half the cost of the rail extension, up from 25 percent. They might take some solace, however, imagining how much worse their commute would be if the thousands of people who are expected to ride the Metro down the Dulles corridor were to drive instead.

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On another matter in the news this week, there's no solace to be taken from the Justice Department's decision to allow Whirlpool's purchase of rival Maytag. This merger between the two leading competitors will leave the combined firm with 50 to 70 percent of the market for washers, dryers, dishwashers and refrigerators.

Thomas Barnett, the department's antitrust chief, had basically two justifications for his long-awaited decision.

The first, to be known henceforth as the Barnett doctrine, is that as long as there is an Asian competitor with excess capacity somewhere in the world, even a company with 70 percent market share won't be able to raise prices.

But just as misguided was Barnett's explanation that the merger will result in significant efficiencies that Whirlpool will pass on to customers in lower prices.

Even a crude back-of- the-envelope calculation quickly reveals how foolish it would be for a company to slash prices for the 60 or 70 percent of the market it already controls to win an additional 5 or 10 percent market share. That strategy may work for products like software, where the cost of producing the additional disks is close to zero. But any executive who tries it with low-margin products like washing machines will soon find himself in the corporate spin cycle.

The Whirlpool decision is bad law based on unproven economics. It sends a clear message to Wall Street that Washington will now accept just about any merger between rivals of any size.

Steven Pearlstein can be reached atpearlsteins@washpost.com.