So Much for the Big Dig: Air Rights Over Toll Road Deemed Impractical Now, Too Expensive Later

The idea of building fun floating buildings over the Toll Road appears to have hit a bit of a snag. An analysis of air rights development near the Reston Parkway metro station came up with a bit of a conundrum: Current market conditions don't favor building foundations for a deck now, but doing it later once Metro construction is complete will be a lot more expensive.

An analysis of the development potential for air rights over the toll road, completed last week, determined that the commercial real estate market isn't presently strong enough to warrant the millions of dollars of extra investment the idea would require. The analysis concluded that the strategy ought to be shelved "until the regional economic market and business conditions are more favorable."

The study was commissioned by the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority after multiple developers -- before the recession began -- inquired about building a deck over the toll road to accommodate new development adjacent to the planned Reston Parkway Metro Station, near the intersection of the toll road and Reston Parkway. The findings were reported to the authority's board of directors last week and the board is expected to act on them this spring.

Our BFFs at Reston 2020 have links to the actual study if you're morbidly curious, but the bottom line is that building the foundation now would cost $34 million, but waiting until later will nearly double the cost to $60 million. But no worries, because the current political climate will ensure that free funding for all sorts of valuable projects will be readily available after the government debt crisis devalues the dollar to somewhere south of the 1980s-era Lira and we have to carry wheelbarrows of the stuff to purchase even one Slim Jim in the future!

Phil Sunderland, vice president and general counsel for the airports authority, said it was encouraging to know that the deck didn't need to be built right now in order for air rights to be an option in the future.

"If we do not do something today, it does not mean that we are dead in the water 20 years from today," he said.

Sunderland compared building a deck speculatively to the authority buying $34 million worth of land, which might qualify as a good investment in some stages in the real estate market, but not at this point. "The conclusion was that the market is probably not going to be there," Sunderland said.

Oh, well. We were tots excited about dining at a Cheesecake Factory overlooking snarled traffic on the Toll Road, but we'll settle for one overlooking snarled traffic on Sunset Hills instead.

Speaking of which, thinking about the space over the Toll Road is a good time to remember we're going to need some more fancy bridges to keep our North Point-to-Hunters Woods runs at Mach 2 above 3 miles per hour, the end.