Tunnel Loses Backers as Landowners Unite for Growth – The Post
A group in favor of Metro to Tysons and not opposed to elevated tracks has formed:

The consortium, called Tysons Tomorrow, will include as many as 20 landowners poised to develop a new city of high-rises around the four Metro stops planned for Tysons. The emergence of the group, which held its first meeting last week, is also intended to weaken the coalition that has staged a heavily financed, year-long effort to build a tunnel under Tysons that would bury the rail tracks. Plans now call for an aerial track, and the effort to alter that plan has been blamed for jeopardizing approval of the 23-mile line.

“I think all of us would say, ‘Of course we like the tunnel,’ ” said Jonathan Cherner, who, with his father and brother, owns Cherner Automotive Group on Route 7 in the heart of Tysons. “But the Federal Transit Administration came back and said, ‘If you want to do a major engineering change to the project, you got to go to the back of the line and start over.’ That process is almost a 10-year process. We don’t need mass transit in 20 years. We needed mass transit 20 years ago.”

I could live with elevated rail through Tysons, but I want all information about the costs of underground vs. above-ground to be made public. I suspect the savings of building elevated rail are pennies on the dollar.

I couldn’t find a Web site for Tysons Tomorrow.

Metro, WMATA, Mass Transit, subway, Tyson’s Corner, Virginia