Examiner Editorial gets it wrong: Choosing cars over transit
Metro got its money in the end. The $1.5 billion that Rep. Tom Davis (R-VA) sought for the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) became law in October 2008, inside the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act of 2008 (PRIIA, Public Law 110-432). The deal paid $150 million a year in federal money, and the District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia each added $50 million a year. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act later renewed the program through FY2030. Earmarks themselves were banned in Congress from 2011. They came back in 2021 as Community Project Funding in the House and Congressionally Directed Spending in the Senate, with public disclosure, a ban on for-profit recipients and a cap of about 1% of discretionary spending. As of November 2026, FY2027 spending runs on a stopgap law (P.L. 119-103) that expires December 11, 2026. New FY2027 earmarks take effect only if Congress passes full-year bills that include them.
The 2006 fight over “the largest earmark in history”
Photo: Kevin Clark, The Washington Post. The exit on the left of the picture is a newly completed bridge built as part of the Springfield Mixing Bowl project in Springfield, Virginia.
This piece first ran in 2006 on the blog Rebuilding Place in the Urban Space, written by Richard Layman. It answered a Washington Examiner editorial titled “Don’t give Metro the ‘largest earmark in history’“. The editorial opposed H.R. 3496, Rep. Davis’s bill to give WMATA $1.5 billion in federal capital money over 10 years. The bill tied that money to tougher federal oversight and to matching funds from Virginia, Maryland and the District. The Examiner reported that Davis had won House approval for the bill.
The blog post argued that the editorial reflected the paper’s editorial-page politics rather than the facts or history of Washington’s transit system. It drew a line between the opinion pages and the news pages, which the author said were not shaped by those politics. It also took a swipe at the paper’s columnist Jay Ambrose.
Supporters and critics took clear positions at the time:
- Supporters, led by Davis and the region’s House delegation, said Metro carried the federal workforce and needed a dedicated capital stream to fix aging trains and track.
- Critics included Ronald Utt of the Heritage Foundation, who called H.R. 3496 a pork-barrel earmark. Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC) briefly held the bill up in committee in April 2007.
Argument one: Congress shut down Washington’s streetcars
The post’s first argument was that federal help for Metro should count partly as a form of repayment, because Congress itself had ordered the end of Washington’s streetcars.
The history behind that claim holds up. After a 1955 transit strike, Congress revoked the Capital Transit Company’s franchise. A new operator, D.C. Transit, owned by O. Roy Chalk, took over in 1956 on the condition that streetcars be replaced by buses by the early 1960s. Chalk asked Congress to reconsider and was turned down. The last Washington streetcar ran on January 28, 1962. The author suggested that Congress acted out of pique, or under lobbying from General Motors and the oil and tire industries, which stood to sell more buses. That motive was the author’s view, not an established finding.
The post also gave the other side. Streetcar ridership had been falling since the 1920s, except during World War II, for several reasons:
- The rise of the privately owned car.
- The Great Depression.
- A steady move to the suburbs, which turned into a flood after the war.
- Regulation that held fares down and left transit companies little money to invest.
- A shortage of streetcars. Some lines, such as the 10/12 line on H Street, were switched to buses so their cars could be moved elsewhere, and new streetcars cost too much during the postwar boom in demand for materials.
Even so, the author noted, some streetcar and light rail systems survived and still run. Examples include SEPTA’s trolleys in Philadelphia, Boston’s Green Line on the T, Toronto’s streetcars, San Francisco’s Muni and the St. Charles line in New Orleans. The original post also listed the Chicago Transit Authority, but Chicago ran its last streetcar in 1958 and the CTA now relies on its “L” rapid transit and an extensive bus system. From those examples the author concluded that Washington’s system could plausibly still be running if Congress had not ordered it closed. For decades afterward, many streetcars retired in the United States kept running in other countries.
Streetcars did return to Washington later. The DC Streetcar opened along H Street NE and Benning Road in February 2016, close to the route of the old H Street line.
Argument two: the Examiner used Metro’s limits against it
The post’s second point was that Metro’s design and history created the very problems the Examiner cited. Building a whole new system from scratch, the cost of buying more rail cars to meet demand, and a subway built with only two tracks all left little room to work around trouble.
The Examiner wrote:
Even Metro acknowledged during that June crisis that it is of dubious value in moving the federal work force to and from work, noting that “delays could be less severe if large numbers of them take advantage of the unscheduled leave option and stay home.”
The author argued that the paper used Metro’s limits as a reason to withhold money, when the same limits could be read as the case for more money.
Argument three: contracting out and the British rail example
The editorial’s third paragraph called for competitive contracting:
Here’s a better idea: Stop subsidizing the waste and mismanagement inherent in an obsolete 1950s mass transportation concept, and force Metro to cut costs, become more efficient and undertake a crash course to learn how transit systems around the country are using competitive contracting to ease burdens on taxpayers while improving service to customers.
The author, who said he read the Examiner closely, wrote that he had seen no reporting in the paper to back up that point. He also said he could think of few US heavy rail or light rail systems run by private contractors.
As a counterexample, the post pointed to British rail privatization. It compared a British train trip with one of the same length on France’s state-owned SNCF and claimed the French trip was much faster and cost about one-third as much. It pointed readers to an earlier entry on the same blog, “U.S. Federal Rail Policy: Learning from Worse Practices.” Since then, Britain has moved to bring its passenger rail operators back into public ownership under the Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Act 2024.
Argument four: who rides Metro, and who pays
The Examiner also argued about fairness:
Since fewer than 1-in-10 Washington region commuters use Metro, approval of the Davis proposal would create the same inequity at the local level as the federal level. Middle- and lower-middle class taxpayers would be forced to subsidize commuting costs of much more affluent Metro riders.
Photo: Rich Lipski, The Washington Post, April 13, 2006. From the Springfield Mixing Bowl, looking south on I-95 toward Richmond, traffic moves slowly because of an earlier accident farther south. The top of the picture shows northbound traffic heading toward the Capital Beltway.
The blog called this misleading for two reasons:
- Road capacity. Using the figure of about 700,000 Metro trips a day and assuming round trips, the author estimated that 200,000 to 300,000 more cars would hit the region’s roads every weekday without Metro.
- Income. The author argued that middle- and lower-income residents are more likely to ride transit than affluent residents, so the Examiner had the fairness argument backwards.
The Examiner itself, and a second editorial
The author called himself a heavy newspaper reader and said the Examiner was good for the region. In his view it added local coverage and pushed The Washington Post to cover more local issues than it otherwise might.
He also noted the paper’s roots. The Examiner grew out of the Journal Newspapers, a Virginia-based suburban chain, and was renamed the “Washington” Examiner partly to sell advertising to national and large regional accounts. Its offices then sat at the northeast corner of 15th and K Streets NW. The post’s view was that two or three pages of local news did not make it a true Washington paper. The point is mostly history now: the Examiner stopped printing a daily paper in 2013 and became a national politics outlet with a weekly magazine.
The next day the paper ran a second editorial, “The Metro tax, brought to you by Davis, Moran, Van Hollen, Wolf, Wynn.” It argued that the plan would raise local taxes. Those five were Reps. Tom Davis (R-VA), Jim Moran (D-VA), Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), Frank Wolf (R-VA) and Albert Wynn (D-MD). The author granted that the editorial was somewhat accurate but said the added burden was unlikely to be large.
The road-subsidy counterpoint
The post then asked why the paper had not called for higher gasoline taxes. The author said that drivers cover only about half the cost of roads through fuel taxes and registration fees, and cited a Brookings Institution report, “Improving Efficiency and Equity in Transportation Finance.”
His reasoning ran like this:
- Start with the claim that drivers pay about 50% of road costs.
- Assign about 20% of road costs to moving goods and services and to other uses such as cycling and walking.
- That still leaves a gap of roughly 30% paid by general taxpayers, including people who ride transit or bike, as the author did.
He added that cities set aside a large share of public space for parking, which he counted as another subsidy to drivers. He then asked why the editorial page, worried about taxes on lower- and middle-income workers, said nothing about this. He suggested the answer might be the paper’s Friday car section, “Wheels,” and the advertising it carried.
The post listed the region’s big road projects as choices that put cars first and did not fully count long-term maintenance costs or induced demand:
| Project | Status in 2006 | What happened next |
|---|---|---|
| Springfield Interchange (“Mixing Bowl”) | Under construction | Completed in 2007 |
| Woodrow Wilson Bridge replacement | Under construction | New spans opened in 2006 and 2008; the project was finished in the following years |
| Intercounty Connector (Maryland Route 200) | Planned | Opened in stages from 2011 to 2014 |
On the Wilson Bridge, the author asked whether the drawbridge design was needed partly to serve the Washington Post’s Robinson Terminal in Alexandria, where newsprint arrived by ship. He wondered whether moving the terminal would have been cheaper. He closed the section by saying he was still waiting for that editorial, and for the Examiner to add a columnist who would balance Jay Ambrose.
Letters, a news story and a Big Dig lesson
The same day’s Examiner also ran two Letters to the Editor in favor of the Metro money, plus a news story, “House leader defends $1.5 billion for transportation.”
The author compared the Metro measure with Alaska’s Gravina Island bridge, the “bridge to nowhere.” His post put the Alaska figure at almost $300 million and the island’s population at 300. Published accounts give lower numbers. PolitiFact reported that the 2005 highway law set aside $223 million for a bridge linking Ketchikan to Gravina Island, which had about 50 residents and the town’s airport. In his view, the Metro money would serve millions more people and was spread over 10 years, not spent in one. In late 2005 Congress removed the bridge’s earmark language but let Alaska keep the money for other transportation uses, and the state later dropped the bridge.
The post also pointed to Eileen McNamara’s Boston Globe column, “Put transit on [the] agenda,” which drew lessons from Boston’s Big Dig and the region’s heavy reliance on cars. The author said the Examiner did not seem ready to take the same lesson.
What the post said in the Examiner’s favor
The author gave the paper credit on four points:
- It ran many transit stories, many by reporter Mike Rupert, about WMATA and about other projects such as the Purple Line proposed for Montgomery and Prince George’s counties. The Purple Line was later approved and built, and it was still under construction in late 2026.
- It ran a five-day-a-week mobility column by Steve Eldridge called “Sprawl and Crawl.” That day’s column was “Gas prices are changing, but our driving habits aren’t following suit,” and the page linked to two weeks of earlier columns. The author said a site redesign had removed an older “columnists” tab that kept a couple of months of columns in one place, and he considered that a step backward.
- One of Eldridge’s columns mentioned the blog and its entry “Use it or lose it or you have to recreate it (U.S. streetcar technology and expertise).”
- All of this, the author wrote, showed again that editorial pages often run at a different temperature than news pages. He had made the same criticism of the Washington Post editorial page, for example in “The Washington Post is resolute: another editorial about DC issues from a suburban perspective (baseball).”
Photo: James Thresher, The Washington Post.
What happened to the Metro money
The bill the Examiner opposed passed, in a different vehicle. Davis’s Metro language was folded into PRIIA, which President George W. Bush signed in October 2008. The deal looked like this:
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Law | Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act of 2008 (P.L. 110-432), Section 601 |
| Federal amount | $1.5 billion over 10 years ($150 million a year) |
| Local match | $50 million a year each from DC, Maryland and Virginia |
| Original end | Authorization ran out after FY2018 |
| Renewal | Reauthorized through FY2030 by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (2021) |
PRIIA is an authorization, so the money still has to be appropriated each year, usually in the Transportation, Housing and Urban Development (THUD) bill. Whether the 2006 critics were right to call it an earmark is still a matter of definition. It went to one named agency, as an earmark does. But it came through a standalone authorizing bill, not a line item slipped into a spending bill.
FAQ
Did Metro get the $1.5 billion?
Yes. The money became law in the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act of 2008, signed in October 2008. It authorized $150 million a year in federal capital funds for 10 years. DC, Maryland and Virginia each had to put in $50 million a year.
Does WMATA still get federal money under that arrangement?
Yes. The original authorization ran out after FY2018, and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act renewed the program through FY2030. Congress still has to appropriate the money each year, mostly through the THUD bill. The three local matching payments continue alongside it.
Are earmarks allowed in Congress now?
Yes. After a ban that began in 2011, both chambers brought earmarks back in 2021. In the House they are called Community Project Funding and in the Senate Congressionally Directed Spending. Members must post their requests publicly, certify that they have no financial interest in them, and send funds only to governments or eligible nonprofits. Total earmarks are capped at about 1% of discretionary spending.
Are there earmarks in FY2027 spending yet?
Not in enacted law as of November 2026. The government runs on a stopgap, H.R. 6500 (P.L. 119-103), signed on September 2, 2026 and funding agencies through December 11, 2026. A stopgap keeps spending at the prior year’s levels and does not carry new earmarks. FY2027 projects take effect only if full-year bills that include them are enacted. That is what happened in FY2025, when a full-year continuing resolution left out the earmarks.
What happened to Alaska’s “bridge to nowhere”?
Congress dropped the earmark language for the Gravina Island bridge in late 2005 but let Alaska keep the money for other transportation projects. The state later dropped the bridge and spent money on ferry service and access roads instead. The project became a symbol in the debate that led to the 2011 earmark ban.
Did streetcars ever come back to Washington?
Yes, on a small scale. The DC Streetcar opened along H Street NE and Benning Road in February 2016, more than 50 years after the last D.C. Transit streetcar ran on January 28, 1962. The new line runs close to the old 10/12 route that the original post described.
Sources
- Congress.gov: H.R. 6500, Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act, 2027
- Congressional Research Service: Overview of Continuing Appropriations for FY2027 (Division A of P.L. 119-103)
- Congressional Research Service: THUD Appropriations for FY2026
- Congressional Research Service: Agriculture and Related Agencies, FY2026 Appropriations
- Maryland Department of Transportation: WMATA, Consolidated Transportation Program
- WMATA: PRIIA funding agreement
- Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments: 2008 release on Tom Davis and Ben Cardin
- Heritage Foundation: “H.R. 3496: The Biggest Pork Barrel Earmark in History?”
- Roll Call: “GOP split on Metro” and “Earmarks flood spending bills after a year’s hiatus”
- PolitiFact: “Half-baked Alaska”
- Holland & Knight: “Community Project Funding: 117th Congress Revives the Earmark Process”
- Seashore Trolley Museum: D.C. Transit car history
Read the complete post at Rebuilding Place in the Urban Space.
Featured image: Jeremy Segrott from Cardiff, Wales, UK / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0
About this article
- Fact-checked before publication.
- Published · Updated
