Metro Silver Line: Fantasy and Reality, Plus The Washington Post Uses Naughty Words

Imagine the excitement in a few decades time when we can step on an express Silver Line train and be whisked directly to the fake ID emporiums midscale retail of Georgetown.

Believe it or not, this is one possible scenario for what Metro envisions the Silver Line looking like by around 2040, when it will build a fancy new subway line under M Street. In this option, the Silver Line would get its own tracks in Arlington, with stops only at East Falls Church and Rosslyn before shifting to M Street.

It's a nice bit of science fiction, but in the meantime, Metro has placed its faith in getting the part of the Silver Line that's actually already on the drawring board built in the hands of the airport authority, which got yet another verbal spanking yesterday from a group of business leaders including the Greater Reston Chamber of Commerce, who held a fancy "press conference" in an empty parking lot off Wiehle Avenue. Fans of schadenfreude will enjoy this fancy video of tongue-lashings about everything from the labor agreement to the decision to build an underground station at Dulles.


Meanwhile, fresh from an earlier trip to the woodshed, airport officials say they expect to come to an agreement on funding and whatnot within "the next couple of weeks," which sounds great but is suspiciously like what we're used to hearing from the contractors who reroofed our mauve mansion, not a multi-billion-dollar railroad.

In the meantime, the Washington Post "news-paper" has run perhaps the strongest argument to date for keeping the Dulles station underground, and they did it by using naughty words!

When did Washington become so half-assed?

I’m sorry. That’s not a nice expression. From here on I’ll use a different one.

When did Washington become so partially buttocked?

That's the last time we'll let the kids flip through the paper looking for Marmaduke. But there's more!

I’ve been flying in and out of Amsterdam a lot recently (no, I’m not going for the hash brownies) and the train station there is practically underneath the terminal. You roll off your transoceanic flight, take a 30-foot escalator ride to a platform, then wait for the train. The whole arrangement is so slick that you see foreign travelers buttonholing random Dutch people just to exclaim, “Your airport is so great! The public transportation is so convenient!”...

Why should other cities have better stuff than Washington? When did we become so partially buttocked?

We certainly weren’t in the past, when most of the great features of our city were built. Every time you look at the Washington Monument, imagine if some of today’s leaders had been in charge when its construction was stalled: They would have said, “It’s going to cost a lot to complete the obelisk all the way up to 555 feet. Let’s just put a roof on it at 152 feet and call it a day.”...

Of course, the whole country seems this way today: makeshift, slapdash, stopgap. But if America ever grows another gluteal hemisphere, I don’t want its future citizens looking back and thinking, “What was up with our forebearers? Were they so stingy and shortsighted that they thought it was a good idea to get us almost to the airport and then let us fend for ourselves?”

If Fairfax and Loudoun are successful in sinking the underground station, I want photos of the politicians who torpedoed it positioned every 50 feet along the pedestrian walkway, with the words “Almost there! Keep going! Not long now!” written in big letters underneath.

Heh. All we know is that if this increasingly silly game of political brinkmanship winds up with the Silver Line ending at Wiehle Avenue, we'll need to replace the rad 80s art planned for the station's walkways with pictures of the same politicians apologizing for the gridlocked sea of Loudoun cut-through commuters clogging Wiehle forever, the end.