Metro Silver Line: Keep Clapping!

Hey, remember that time the Feds were going to cancel funding for Metro's awesome E-ticket ride nonstop through the wonderland of Tysons Tegucigalpa directly to the end of the mile-long, slow as molasses security lines at Dulles? But then after people started whining about the need for mass transit and gas prices and no-bid contracts and tunnels and whatnot, they decided to give Virginia officials another month to file some awesome paperwork in quadruplicate before officially rejecting the plan? Yeah, that was awesome. So March 1 rolled by about... oh, 12 days ago, and no word on the project. Whazzup with that?

Well, apparently Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine and U.S. Secretary of Transportation Margaret Peters are now BFFs! They released a joint statement last week saying everything's hunky-dory, and then went off to see an early show of "Step Up 2 the Streets" or maybe listen to some Bobby Sherman records or something:

U.S. Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters and Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine said in a joint statement on Friday that they are making progress in efforts to get federal funding for the project.

While Kaine said things were going just peachy, Peters repeated her earlier concerns about the project costing just too darn much because that's what pencil-pushing Washington types love to do, so we'd all better hold off on the Bobby Sherman records.

In the meantime, a report from one of those hippy-dippy public interest groups says that Metro is already saving hundreds of millions of dollars in oil, largely because folks sitting in darkened train tunnels while someone drones on inscrutably about a track fire over the static-filled PA system can't drive until the aforementioned track fires are put out and they're deposited in their exurban kiss-n-ride lot. The usual suspects are hoping this will make the Bush administration appointee change her mind, since if there's one thing that makes their ears prick up in Pavlovian fashion, it's the word "oil."

In the meantime, people inTysons Tegucigalpa are whining about all the growth planned for their cozy, village-like community.

“They're trying to stuff a 10-pound melon in a five-pound sack,” said Ed Stabler, a Vienna resident who works in McLean.

Hmm. Maybe they should have thought about that before spending several years bickering about tunnels vs. monorails.