D.C. Dotcom

The change in the balance of power can be seen in the most fundamental ways, starting with the commute. Most mornings on the Dulles Toll Road, traffic leaving the federal district has begun to rival that of old-fashioned commuters heading downtown. In the past year alone, commuters admit, the drive time has increased 50%. Traffic is so bad that the Washington region ranks second only to Los Angeles in severity of snarls. The area is short on roads, bridges, ramps--everything but cars. Local police have begun to complain that well-heeled commuters blithely invade high-occupancy-vehicle lanes to save time; the $50 ticket doesn't slow many of these folks down. Traffic, says the NVTC's Backus, "is by far our biggest problem."

But who cares? Last year a local techie in blue jeans and a sports shirt walked into Ferrari of Washington, a former furniture dealership located discreetly in a glass-and-brick office park in Sterling, Va. The buyer knew exactly where he wanted his new car to go: in his living room. Sales manager Ralph Cestero knew just what to do. He collected the $225,000 price on the 550 Maranello and arranged delivery. "We took the car over," Cestero relates, "and saw that he had removed a wall of his house and built a large ramp up to the living room floor." Cestero is doing so well he has taken down the billboard ad he had placed at Dulles Airport and is donating the savings to charity.

In the end, the new techies may solve the traffic problem in their own inimitable way. Local developers are planning a web of six or seven helicopter ports around the region to cut commuting time in the three-county area as well as to make fast connections to airports. Meanwhile, the Cessna sales office at once sleepy Leesburg Municipal Airport in Loudoun County has become one of the best-performing sales points in the nation. Last year Mark Peters nearly doubled his quota and sold 40 planes. "There are a lot of prosperous so-called geeks out there who want to fly," says Peters. "The Dulles Toll Road should be called the Yellow Brick Road--and the yellow is gold."

It's not a coincidence that Virginia license plates recently got a new slogan: THE INTERNET CAPITAL OF THE WORLD.