Unless
Scott Monett and the TysonsTunnel.org folks have something up their sleeve,
it looks like the struggle over Metro to Dulles may be "over" even though it's not going "under" Tysons Corner (in a tunnel as opposed to the much-much-much-less-desirable aerial alignment).
U.S. transportation officials sealed their commitment to a long-planned extension of Metro to Dulles International Airport at a ceremony today in which Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood signed a formal agreement to provide $900 million in funding considered crucial to the project's success.
[...]
The Silver Line will run along the median of the Dulles Access Road for most of its journey, with an aerial track carrying it through Tysons Corner despite a strong grass-roots push to build underground. Regulators and politicians alike said a tunnel would have been prohibitively expensive and would have set the regulatory process back at least a year, imperiling the entire project. The extension will run underground for a short distance in Tysons, at the intersection of Routes 7 and 123.
What other options are left at this point? Not many, as far as I know, but I'm hoping that Scott Monett and Company have something clever cooking to get this thing built right - with competitive bidding AND with a tunnel alignment in Tysons Corner. If not, we'll be asking ourselves 10, 20, 50 years from now: why did they build that @#$%@#$! thing the way they did when they could have had it with a (far superior) tunnel in Tysons for less money AND faster using "single bore" tunneling technology? Argh!
