The debate over whether to build a Metrorail extension below or above ground through Tysons Corner has officially made it to the big time. Last week, video clips of a rally held by tunnel supporters were posted on YouTube, where they had been viewed hundreds of times. Even more surprising, a teenager has been devoting his blog to the debate.
Hans Mast, 19, has been maintaining his blog, at http://hansmast.com, for 2 1/2 years. In recent weeks, he has given over the blog almost entirely to pro-tunnel postings about the latest developments in the increasingly heated debate, which is threatening to play a role in this fall’s county and state elections.
Mast is an unlikely chronicler of the project. He is a native of Fauquier County and a student at Sharon Mennonite Bible Institute in Pennsylvania, where he is training to be a missionary, with his first posting likely to be in Thailand.
Thanks, Alec!
He says he learned of the tunnel debate from Guy Schum, a public relations executive whose firm has been assisting the group pushing for a below-ground route and who attends the Mast family’s church, Faith Christian Fellowship in Fauquier. The company owned by Mast’s father, Golden Rule Travel and Communications, has one of its computer servers at Tysons, and Mast says he has been through the area enough to know that a below-ground route would make far more sense.
“I saw in this a very clear-cut right-and-wrong answer . . . and I decided to jump right in,” he said.
Mast acknowledges that his advocacy of a potentially more costly transit option might be seen as at odds with his strong conservative political philosophy.
But he argues that public transportation is an area in which market rules simply don’t apply because, though transit is necessary, it usually isn’t economically viable without subsidy. “It’s going to happen, and we might as well do it right if we’re going to do it,” he said.
For the record, Mast is not the only blogger in his family. His 17-year-old brother Benji runs an “awesome photoblog.” Heidi, 15, is the “family event blogger.” Kristi, 10, doesn’t have a blog, but she has been reading Edward Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” And Dietrich, 6, is “just plain cool.”
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