Rail and Navigation Lines

If readers have not guessed it by now I am a local news junkie. Maybe I tune out things I can not control or perhaps even understand like the war in Iraq, and social issues like evolution. After scanning the front page of The Washington Post on Sundays, I routinely turn to the Loudoun Section and look for Eugene Scheel’s occasional stories about the Piedmont. They almost always bring back a memory that I have as a young boy growing up in Loudoun County. Today’s article, At the End of the Line, An Opportunity Lost, reminded me of the train that brought my trunk home from summer camp in Maine. Leesburg was a Railway Express terminal, the FedEx of the early part of the last century. The story also triggered thoughts about the number one issue in Loudoun County today – transportation.

I called my friend and Town Council member Ken Reid, who is a transportation guru, to get his reaction to the article. Ken reminded me of the proposed Metro Purple Line from Bethesda, through Chevy Chase Lake, Silver Spring, and New Carrollton continuing on to complete a full circle of Washington like the Beltway. The proposed Purple Line right-of-way in Montgomery County is another abandoned heavy rail line. Trains on this line moved coal and freight to Georgetown. Ken said that politics, not the cost of the right-of-way, doomed the line. Nevertheless every few years the idea resurfaces. This triggered another memory bell. Part of the political pressure stemmed from the Columbia County Club whose members include powerful Washington area businessmen and professionals.

Columbia Club is located just north of East-West Highway and about a mile south of the Beltway. The proposed Purple Line railway right-of-way like the W&OD trail is also a walking and bike trail. This railroad right-of-way runs through the Columbia Club golf course between the 14th and 15th greens. Golfers today use two tunnels to walk or drive golf carts under the trail. On the other side of the trail from the golf course is historic Hayes Manor. (Note it is Hayes, not Haynes, but there is a family connection.) My great uncle George T. Dunlop, Jr. bought Hayes Manor in the 1902 and lived there until he died in the 1950s. My cousin, close friend, and mentor Langhorne Bond is George Dunlop’s grandson. Langhorne’s father lived in China for 22 years. He worked for Pan American World Airways trying to save China National Aviation Corporation from the clutches of the Japanese. CNAC was a fledging airline jointly own by the Chinese government and Pan Am. As war loomed he sent Langhorne and his brother to Chevy Chase to live at Hayes Manor. After George Dunlop died, Hayes was sold to Post cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post’s granddaughter, Ellen McNeil Charles. In the 1990’s Hayes manor’s property was divided. The Manor house and a small amount of land were purchased by Columbia Club, and the remaining land by The Howard Hughes Medical Institute as their main campus. This is the same medical research organization that recently opened in Loudoun County at Janella Farm on Rt. 7.

Langhorne followed his father’s aviation interest and became Administrator of the FAA in the 1970’s. Last October Prince Philip of England indoctrinated him as an honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of Navigation honoring Langhorne’s work to save LORAN and make it a backup for GPS navigation. The Greenwich meridian is the line where time and navigation begins.

Perhaps the history of these different lines will help us solve Loudoun’s transportation problems, and then again maybe not. Hopefully at least the history is entertaining.

Outside.in & The Loudoun Scoop

As I write this the outside temperature is just above the single digits and moving in from the outside is indeed a good move. But a move that works in any season and anywhere is the new website outside.in. That’s all you need, just those two words. outside.in is the creation of best selling author Steven Johnson. A lucky few met Steven at a book signing lunch just after Christmas in Leesburg when Steven told us about his new book, The Ghost Map, the story of a London neighborhood stricken with a cholera epidemic and how this medical mystery was solved.

Outside.in is also about neighborhoods, and like the true story of The Ghost Map, residents unlock the “mysteries” of what is happening in their neighborhood. Enter a zip code and you will get the scoop on the neighborhood. News on the arts, bars, community, crime, schools, kids, etc. are a few of the many tags that can be placed on articles about any neighborhood. Top tags for 20175 and 20176 (Leesburg) are events, politics, Loudoun, Dulles, concerts, New Years Eve. Click on any tag and read everything posted about these subjects in Leesburg. Outside.in has teamed up with Google to supply a map called the “Dashboard”. If you are looking at any community, drag the map to a community nearby that you want to check out.

Outside.in is only a few months old, but growing like wildfire. In early January about a month after launching the 100,000th story was posted. Over a 1,000 stories are added every day by contributors. By early February over 1,650 blogs had been submitted to outside.in, and they were in 56 cities and 3,201 neighborhoods.

Outside.in will soon cover the world, but a great source of local news is The Loudon Scoop a creation of David D'Onofrio. If you are like me and do not have time to read all the many local Loudoun County papers cover to cover, The Loudoun Scoop is a great way to quickly stay up-to-date on what’s in the news about Loudoun County. I often find news I am interested in days before I read it in the papers because The Loudoun Scoop links to articles the papers publish on their websites. Join the Scoop email list and you will receive a daily reminder.

The Scoop and outside.in are a great way of staying in tune with what is happening.

Free Markets – part III (Parking)

On February 3rd the Wall Street Journal ran a story, Parking Fix. (I believe you need to subscribe to the WSJ for this link to work.) It pointed out that “Free-market economists are overhauling a frustration of American life -- and erasing what may be one of the last great urban bargains”. The article should be food for thought for our city and town leaders particularly in Northern Virginia in places like Leesburg where on-street parking is limited and off-street parking in the Historic District is scarce.

The article says that planners for years believed that, “cities can never have too much parking, and it can never be cheap enough. But a small but vocal band of economists, city planners and entrepreneurs is shaking that up, promoting ideas like free-market pricing at meters and letting developers, rather than the cities, dictate the supply of off-street parking.”

“Seattle is doing away with free street parking in a neighborhood just north of downtown. London has meters that go as high as $10 an hour, while San Francisco has been trying out a system that monitors usage in real time, allowing the city to price spots to match demand. (A recent tally there showed that one meter near AT&T Park brings in around $4,500 a year, while another meter about a mile away takes in less than $10.) Gainesville, Fla., has capped the number of parking spots that can be added to new buildings; Cambridge, Mass., works with companies to reduce off-street parking.”

Donald Shoup, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles published a book, The High Cost of Free Parking. Shoup accuses cities of "mismanagement of the worst sort". He developed the "85% rule, the Journal reports. “Cities, he says, should charge whatever rates lead to about 85% of the spots being filled up at any given time, moving rates up or down as demand fluctuates”. The 85% target now serves as a policy guideline for cities including Portland, Ore., and Anchorage, Alaska.

Cities and towns like Redwood City, and San Francisco are finding that Shoup’s ideas and similar free market solutions are working. Maybe this is one idea from California that Virginia should buy into.

Free Markets – part II (Tolls)

This week I first watched Republican Congressman Frank Wolf, next Independent Scott York, chairman of the Board of Supervisors, Democrat Steve Miller candidate for the Board of Supervisors, and a parade of other politicians from all parties chastise the owners of the Greenway for proposing a toll increase which they characterized as “highway robbery”. All the while 3 or 4 television cameras were rolling, and a larger group of reporters were busily scribbling notes. No one should be surprised at the position every politician took – it’s an election year! The politicians were followed by some of the same activist “ANNs” that are regular speakers at public hearings and other such meetings. (This word has become an acronym for Against, Never, No. I have never heard this group speak in favor of anything.)

As I watched this show, finally a speaker who I thought I could relate to spoke. This man impressed me with his education and knowledge of business and economics. He discussed rates of return, various benchmarks like the S&P 500. But soon he lost me. I usually can follow this kind of logic as that’s what I do for a living, and I have a long-ago degree in economics. He seemed to draw the conclusion that a 15% return on investment was excessive and more than you can get investing in the S&P 500. He is right on the last point. But if everyone just invested in stocks and bonds, we would have no risk capital, and no Microsoft’s, Apple’s, or the zillion small start up companies that make Loudoun County what some call the Silicon Valley of the east.

Maggie Bryant took a huge risk when she invested in the Greenway, almost 20 years ago. So did every investor since then. I heard that TRIP II, the company that owns the Greenway made its first profit in 2005, over ten year after the road opened. That sounds like risk to me - a risk for which any sophisticated investor would expect double digit returns well above 15%. “Return on investment”, or ROI in geek speak, is based on three variables, what you invest, the amount you receive when you sell, and the time in between. If you double your money in two to three years, the ROI is very attractive. If you double your money in 15 years, you should have invested in a government bond. The Greenway investors have never doubled their money or come close to it.

Having said that, I don’t believe anyone, private citizen or government, can say what the right price should be. However, as my hero Warren Buffet would say, Mr. Market can and will. In a free market, prices will adjust to the law of supply and demand. Our roads are a free market, not a monopoly. If one road is crowded or dangerous, we use other roads. When I lived in Maryland in the 1980’s I drove to work in Leesburg on Georgetown Pike. When I saw several bad accidents, I opted for Rt. 7. Now I use the Greenway most of the time because it is safer and faster. Would I use it if the toll was $4? I don’t know, but I would have a choice.

Remember that the Greenway is a private road. The owners pay for everything – police patrols, snow removal, mowing grass, new lanes, and toll plazas. Notice the two new bridges and exits at Shreve Mill Road/Crosstrail Boulevard and at Battlefield Parkway. These exits will be completed and opened long before our governments build the roads to the bridges. And that is exactly what happened with the Greenway – a road before its time, and the finest road in Loudoun County, and probably all of Virginia.