Motorists have been stranded on a major interstate in Virginia since last night
There are a lot of comments here about why public transit in the DC area doesn&#x27;t work, but nobody that I&#x27;ve seen has put their finger on it.<p>The biggest issue is that the area covers two states, at least ten counties depending on what you count as the “DC area”, plus the District of Columbia, which isn&#x27;t a state, doesn&#x27;t have control over its own budget, and has no representation in Congress. Oh, and in Virginia cities are not part of counties so for instance Arlington is it’s own political entity. Plus DC doesn&#x27;t have control over a large part of its own tax base because the biggest landholder in the city is the federal government, which is exempt from local property taxes. And because unlike everywhere else in the US DC workers who live in Virginia or Maryland don&#x27;t pay DC taxes, because the Virginia and Maryland Congressional delegations have warped the DC tax code such that all that money stays in their own states.<p>Any area-wide public transit project thus has to politically negotiate two Congressional delegations, one city that is in theory represented by the entirety of Congress, and 10+ local governments, any of which effectively has veto power over a project; and the primary beneficiary of the project, DC, is de facto not going contribute financially in proportion to how much it benefits because it’s budget won&#x27;t allow it to do so.<p>Similarities to e.g. Hong Kong or Europe fail on those grounds. DC area public transit fails because the DC area is a living example of how federalism fails.