Millions Wise and Billions Foolish: Airport Authority Opts for Above-Ground Metro Station

As widely suspected as the pressure continued to mount, the airport authority voted Wednesday to reverse itself and build the Dulles Airport Metro station above ground, in the vague proximity of the parking lots airport.

The move is hardly surprising, given the airport authority's well-publicized trip to the woodshed, courtesy of U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. The writing was on the wall after the Loudoun County board of supervisors publicly signaled their willingness earlier in the week to foot more of the bill for developing stations in its particleboard wastelands -- with the above-ground station as a condition.

Bottom line? Barring catastrophe, Phase 2 of the Silver Line will be built. The Dulles station will be above-ground, ugly, and inconvenient to airport travelers. Toll Road tolls will continue to rise, but maybe a bit less than the worst-case scenario (keep clapping!) And the Silver Line, which was initially billed as a much-needed connection to the airport, will actually become a tool to fuel further development in the Dulles Corridor, especially with the public-private partnerships that will wind up building the remaining stations. The good news for us in Reston is that, with the threat of the Silver Line ending at Wiehle no longer an issue, all that development will get spread out along the Dulles Corridor a bit more, and not just end with a collection of parallelograms surrounded by Loudoun cut-through commuters sitting in perpetual gridlock on Wiehle Avenue, the end.