Posts about MWAA

Smaller airports like National serve a different market, and many major US international airports have far worse or no rail connections. JFK, for instance, requires taking a whole separate train to the subway or commuter rail.

Dulles, however, also requires a train, only inside. Sadly, the poor design of Dulles, centralizing everything into a single terminal which forces passengers to take a second long trip after a long security line, makes flying there fairly unpleasant. How many people will be deterred by the extra unpleasantness of the walkway to the parking garage?

Have you used the rail connections at Heathrow, de Gaulle, Frankfurt and other major international airports? What was your experience like? What was good and bad? And how does it compare to Dulles, whether with or without the extra moving walkway?

I hope that you will ask the District's nominees to the MWAA Board of Directors how they will increase transparency and ensure that the interests of the District are better safeguarded than they have in the past.

On transparency and accountability, the MWAA Board is one of the worst in the region. The times, dates, and locations of their board meeetings are not posted online. Agendas are not made available to the public, nor are minutes of their meetings.

Certainly no recordings are available via streaming audio or video or on cable TV. Contrast this to the DC Council, the WMATA Board, and many others which post their schedules, agendas and actions and broadcast their meetings.

Furthermore, the MWAA Board makes most decisions in executive session, behind closed doors, then emerges only to ratify those decisions publicly. This contravenes guidelines and possibly even laws concerning eligible topics for executive session, offending good governance practices.

In years past, the authority only operated the airports themselves. Their revenues came entirely from airline fees. Their actions thus only affected our everyday lives when we took an airplane trip. They had a clear, narrow mandate.

Today, however, the authority controls the Dulles Toll Road and thus is collecting money from everyday commuters. They are building the Metro Silver Line, and contributing to bus service and road projects in the area. Their decisions reach far beyond the airports themselves.

For example, in 2010, the authority announced it was going to take funding away from the Fairfax Connector buses. These buses serve commuters going to Metro stations for trips into jobs in DC, and for DC residents who work in Tysons Corner and elsewhere in the corridor. Therefore, they do benefit DC residents and DC employers.

Instead, MWAA wants to spend the money on a freeway loop along Virginia route 606 stretching around the back of Dulles Airport. This will benefit almost no DC residents at all because it doesn't help people go to or from DC. Rather, it will speed up travel between Loudoun County and Prince William County, driving housing and job growth in these sprawling areas and encouraging more residents and employers to locate in parts of our region very distant from the District.

The airports authority should not be making these transportation decisions. They are not doing this in concert with COG and the TPB. They did not solicit input from residents in either Fairfax or the District. They are, instead, trying to push a specific economic development plan being pushed by a small subset of Northern Virginia business leaders and which is definitely not in the best interests of the District or even most Northern Virginia residents.

DC's several members of the MWAA board have not discussed these issues publicly with the Council or with residents of the District. They haven't held forums to hear from residents. We expect our Metro Board members to communicate with the public about key decisions from that agency and our Councilmembers communicate on important decisions they make. Our MWAA directors should do the same.

On the Silver Line, MWAA is making decisions that will have long-term effects on WMATA's ridership and costs long into the future. For example, moving the Dulles Airport station farther from the airport would save money now but could decrease ridership, meaning higher costs for area governments in the future.

Which is better? There can be debate about this, but if the debate only happens behind closed doors and with people solely concerned about the Airports Authority's narrow and immediate interests, we could all end up paying for a century or more.

When Mr. Session and Ms. Hall come before you in this hearing, I hope you will ask both of them what they will do to push for greater transparency and accountability from the MWAA Board, such as opening up meetings and using new technology.

I also hope you will ask them how they will involve residents of DC, elected Councilmembers, and regional bodies like COG and the TPB in the far-reaching, regional decisions that MWAA is making not just about the airports themselves but about how commuters travel to and from DC and around Northern Virginia.

Thank you.

Thwarting terrorism should not be the top priority of the people leading transit projects. They should focus their energies on ensuring that the line is designed and located to maximize public convenience and public use, to guide future development, and to be built on-time and on-budget.

While government budgets are tightening and after Silver Line projected costs have already escalated, the MWAA is in no position to design security systems "regardless of what it costs." Instead of fetishizing something that likely won't happen, MWAA should instead look at how station placement will effect the thousands of people expected to use the line each day.

The Airports Authority is looking to save millions of dollars by moving the planned Dulles Airport station hundreds of feet away from the terminal, requiring airport passengers and employees to trek 600 feet across a parking lot just to enter the main terminal. The Silver Line plan already deleted the Tysons tunnel in favor of a cheaper aerial line, even though the former would better transform Tyson into a livable city.

What's questionable is not the security apparatus MWAA wants to install, but the spare-no-expense attitude that project managers only apply to prevent something extraordinarily unlikely. Imagine if we spent that money on things that actually mattered, like tunneling through Tysons, extra escalators, or a station closer to the airport terminal.

The security budget might not cost as much as moving a station hundreds of feet, but it's worrying that MWAA is only willing to write a blank check once the 'terrorism' word appears. The Airports Authority is prepared to lavish money on infinitesimally small threats while tightening the purse strings for features that will aid thousands of people each day.

Virginia and Maryland's senators also are mostly protecting Dulles and BWI, wanting to drive as much traffic there. Each airport is more convenient to more of their constituents but less convenient to DC. More remote airports also drive sprawl, creating incentives for large office parks to locate near the airport but very distant from the rest of the region.

Meanwhile, unless the plan has changed, it would replace some amount of micromanaging at National with other micromanaging by different senators. For example, Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) included tried to include a provision requiring four small carriers to fly to West Texas, likely not the area with the highest travel demand to and from DC.

It's be great if hearings into MWAA looked into another important issue: Why MWAA is less transparent and accountable to local residents than other governing bodies. When MWAA decided to take away funding for Fairfax Connector buses along the Dulles Toll Road and prioritize freeway construction, there was little accountability. Unfortunately, when these senators talk about accountability, they naturally just mean accountability to them.

What do you think?

Update: Joe Brenckle from the Republican side of the Commerce Committee explained some details of the current proposal. It does not include Senator Hutchison's suggested amendment requiring some flights to West Texas. It would add 5 flights to go to "new entrant or limited incumbent air carriers" which could go outside the perimeter, and allow up to 16 existing flights to be changed to ones beyond the perimeter.

Complaining to the Flyer management yields the response that there is no demand. "Take a look around you," they told me. "There are only 10 passengers. We can't even fill the buses at two per hour, much less if we ran four or six."

With that kind of faulty logic, a single bus per day would be packed with passengers. Rather, generous scheduling is key to any successful transit service.

There is fantastic demand to get to Dulles. The airport has an astounding 40,000 parking spaces, which consume 300 acres. The problem is that parking and transit are handled by two different authorities with two different profit structures pricing regimes. Neither has any mandate to do anything about the carbon toeprint.

Passengers who drive can park for $10 per 24 hours, which also buys them a free, frequent shuttle bus to the terminal. Since the Flyer costs $10 each way, not including the Metrorail fare to West Falls Church, this inexpensive parking makes it financially advantageous for a single person on a one- or two-day out-of-town trip to drive.

With more passengers in the group, the reward for driving increases. And compared to using a taxi roundtrip, the cost of parking breaks even for about 10 days of travel.

Passengers aren't the only ones who travel to Dulles. The airport's workforce is an astonishing 36,000. For every 12 airline passengers and their toeprints, there are an additional nine airline and airport workers driving on the Dulles Access Road and other routes. These people have it even better. Courtesy the Transportation Security Administration, parking for them is free. The Washington Flyer offers Dulles employees a discount of $4 on each bus trip, but how many people with the choice would choose to take a bus for $6 versus driving a car for free?

It's not that Americans "love to drive" or "can't be pried out of their cars." Maybe they just prefer not to be stupid enough to turn down low cost parking and a personalized schedule for expensive and intermittent transit. As for the toeprint—society's costs of wider highways, wasted gasoline, air pollution, heat island effect, loss of productive land, water pollution from runoff and extra automobiles—those are paid by everyone, even those who use transit.

Solving this problem is not that difficult. It can be done incrementally. After all, creating an airport with 40,000 parking spaces but only two or three half-filled shuttle buses an hour was also done incrementally.

On day one, increase parking rates for travelers by $2 per day, not a devastating increase but enough to nudge a few thousand people onto transit. Simultaneously, reduce the TSI parking subsidy to workers by $2 a day and raise the bus subsidy by the same amount, nudging a few more thousand away from cars.

With this mini-surge in demand, the Flyer and Metro can reduce the headway between buses to 20 minutes and the Flyer can also reduce its fare a bit. One year later, $2 more for all parkers, a slug of additional transit passengers, and a bus schedule of every 15 minutes or maybe even every 10.

The third year, who knows? Maybe $20 parking, continuous low-cost shuttle service, significantly fewer cars on the road, less pressure to widen I-66, cleaner air and the opportunity to start depaving some of the vast expanse of asphalt at Dulles would all become feasible. Finally we'd be going from a cycle that used to be vicious to one that is virtuous.

The United States spent 75 years moving up inexorably from transit to cars. We can climb back down this shaky ladder in the same methodical way, by charging appropriate costs for autos and providing transit levels that match the growth in demand. The place to start is with large public institutions that have predictable ridership and manageable transit modes—places like Dulles Airport.