When I was a little boy, my family lived in Boulder, Colo. During that time, there was a stretch of a connector ramp along the highway to Denver that rose high into the sky and just stopped. It was like one of those pieces of road that the “Dukes of Hazzard” or “Smokey and the Bandit” used to fly over although neither one of those shows or movies had been created yet. It was a thing of wonder and endless fantasy for a boy in first or second grade. My Dad told me that the state had run out of money and couldn’t finish it. Even at a young age, I found that very strange; why would a state start to build something if it didn’t know whether or not it could finish it? Wasn’t that wasting money? Do you think they’d let me ride my bike up there and just look down? Many of you probably already know where this is leading. … I had a great sense of deja vu as I read William Flook’s piece Thursday about the Dulles Rail project going forward without being certain of federal funding. Instead of the Rocky Mountains, though, the backdrop was a bunch of mismatched office buildings in Tysons Corner.

It takes a certain amount of bluster or chutzpah to hire a company like Big-Dig Bechtel and to just start working on a project that you know you can’t get more than halfway done without a huge pot of money from the federal government. That is the same federal government that is telling planners in terms that are increasingly less vague that this project may be dead on arrival. This is the same federal government that once again this year told planners that ridership numbers don’t justify the enormous cost of a project where much of the rights-of-way are essentially donated.

This is a project where the rails may come out of a tunnel west of Tysons and simply stop; elevated high in the air while some 7-year-old boy asks his father “Why did they stop building that, Dad?” only to be told, “The state ran out of money, son.”

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Daryl lives in the Lake Ridge area and writes: “I’ve been noticing something for some time now and I don’t quite understand it. There seems to be a number of drivers out there who think it’s perfectly all right to make a U-turn at a red light. Now I know it’s illegal to make a left turn on red as I’m sure they do, too, but for them to think it OK to make a U-turn just doesn’t make any sense. Have you come across this?”

I have seen drivers do this occasionally but not in numbers that seems to indicate a trend. Maybe those drivers are just too busy to wait for a red light or maybe they just have to keep moving even if it’s in the opposite direction. It doesn’t make any sense to me but maybe some of our readers have ideas about why this would be happening.