Sunday, April 30, 2006; B06
THE NEW METRORAIL line to Dulles International Airport and beyond, on which construction may begin in the next year, is not only one of the nation's biggest new transit projects and a vital commuter link for Northern Virginia. As important, it offers the best chance for weaving a true urban fabric out of this region's second downtown, Tysons Corner. So if the new rail line is to be built, which seems all but inevitable, it should be done right. And that means an underground tunnel through Tysons.
Virginia officials, developers and planners have gone back and forth on whether the rail line should tunnel under Tysons or be elevated above it. The original plan for a tunnel was scrapped in favor of an elevated line for reasons of cost. Now the underground-vs.-aerial debate has been rejoined at the eleventh hour, on the eve of a federal funding deadline.
It is a critical juncture. Tysons has more office and commercial space than downtown Atlanta, and it continues to boom. But it is also a quasi-place -- undeniably vibrant (and maddeningly congested) but too sprawling and patchy and disaggregated to fit anyone's image of a real downtown. It badly needs stitching together, and Metrorail, which managed to do just that along the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor in Arlington, could be the catalyst. The decision will do much to define Tysons future.
An elevated line poses problems that go beyond the visual and aesthetic. Aboveground stations and pedestrian bridges would require Metro riders to cross over roadways to their destinations, rather than enabling them to alight easily from stations onto pedestrian-friendly streets or directly into office buildings or shopping malls. In wintertime elevated stations and bridges would be uninviting to some, daunting to others. They would be more expensive to maintain.
Project developers say that tunneling beneath Tysons could add more than $800 million to the project's already staggering price tag of $4 billion. But tunnel advocates insist that new technology, proven in Europe, enables tunnels to be built more cheaply and efficiently than before -- indeed, for little more than the cost of building aboveground. They maintain that the project's developers, a consortium of the engineering giant Bechtel and Washington Group International, overstated the tunnel's price to drive away other contractors. If the Spanish company Dragados, which is proposing the tunnel, can build it for anything like the aboveground price, it should be given the chance -- and accept the risk if its cost estimates are understated.
State officials, who will make the final call, need an independent-minded cost estimate that is fair and thorough, even if that means a delay. Major landowners along the proposed Metrorail route through Tysons, who are to pay a quarter of the project's cost, must also make themselves heard. Fairfax County Supervisor T. Dana Kauffman, the current Metro Board chairman, was correct when he told The Post's Alec MacGillis that "Sixty years from now, our excuses for not doing the right thing today won't hold water."
