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The only way the silverline helps your typical daily DTR driver is by taking traffic off the road thereby reducing congestion for those left on the road. To do that you need commuter lots adjacent to stations, giving people a place to park and ride.

Currently there is one commuter park/ride station on the books, a 2200 vehicle lot in Reston at Wiele ave.

The DTR sees what, ~450K vehicles per day, taking less than a one half of one percent of the traffic off the road isn't going to be noticable to anyone, least of all the hundreds of thousands of people coming from Sterling VA and beyond every day.

Will additional lots be built in the decades to come as the silver line stretchs to Ashburn? Probably, but making a very small and select group of people shoulder the majority of the cost for something that a fraction of a percent of people "may" benefit from in the next decade in the form of less DTR congestion and a still small but larger fraction "may" benefit from in terms of less traffic in the next couple of decades is simply ridiculous.

Furthermore, the Silverline isn't being routed through any existing highdensity residential areas. Will these future stations become high density mixed/use centers in the decades to come? I am sure they will, but again that does absolutely nothing for the people being beaten to death with these tolls now or in their usable future.

So yes, my point stands, there is no benefit to the DTR users paying for it, certainly not one that adds up to $360 bucks a year in additional tolls every year (inflation adjusted) for the next ~decade.

Now you could argue externalities all day long about cleaner air and healthier people, but until you put a legitimate price tag on those supposed "benefits" specifically to DTR and Greenway corridor drivers coming from Reston to Leesburg then you can't claim them as benefits, certainly not worth an additional 360 bucks a year per DTR driver.

What they are doing is assesing a demographic that has nothing to gain, the entire cost of something they won't use. It would be like specifically assesing every Arlington County CABI member an additional $500 bucks a year to pay for the DC Streetcar system. Will some Arlington residents use the system at somepoint in the coming decades? Sure, but the cost to that specifc population of people far outweighs the benefit, if there is one.

by freely on Apr 13, 2011 11:42 am • link • report