Blinking on urban design means you limit your chance for success

Today's newspapers, such as this article in the Post, "No Tunnel For Tysons, Kaine Says," subtitled "Federal Concerns About Cost Prove Insurmountable," report that the State of Virginia has rolled over and won't push for underground subway service in the Tysons Corner area, because of how it increases the cost of the project in a way that the flawed scoring methodology of the Federal Transit Administration makes it more likely that the project won't be funded.

See:
-- Governor Kaine Announces Decision to Advance Aerial Option for Dulles Corridor MetroRail Project," the Virginia press release; and
-- Tunnel Vision, the blog entry from Getting There (Friends of the Earth blog) which discusses the defects in the FTA scoring methods.

As a pro-center city person, I think it's great that Tyson's Corner will continue to embrace the automobile-centric sprawl paradigm. Given the reality of transit 'rithmetic, you can't build your way out of sprawl. Underground rail would be faster and would allow for better reconnection from an urban design perspective, above-ground. (Heavy Rail has a different effect at ground level than say a streetcar.)
Washington Post photo of Tysons Corner by Tracy Woodward. Map from the Washington Post.

But as a pro-transit person, I am worried, because when you make bad choices that degrade the quality of service--not placing stations where there are people, not putting the line where it serves the most people, cost- and time-effectively, means that you limit the success of the service in a manner that reduces support for transit overall, by both transit riders as well as non-transit riders who still must be supportive, because their tax dollars also fund transit.

I'm snagging this text from White Knuckled Wanderer's entry, "Fairfax Misses a Chance. Again" on the subject:

The ironic thing about this latest failed opportunity to do transit to Dulles and Tysons right, is that many of the Fairfax supervisors and planners had learned from the past legacy of awful transit planning in Fairfax and were pushing for the tunnel because they knew how much of a difference it would make.

In the past, comparing Fairfax to Arlington or parts of Montgomery county (Bethesda) is a case study in harnessing the power of transit to channel growth and successful economic development with well-planned transit. In the book I just read, The Great Society Subway, Zachary Schrag has a chapter that uses Fairfax as an illustration of Metro done poorly in the suburbs.

I think a lot of today's Fairfax leaders remember these lessons. It's evident in this quote from the Post story:

"This will prove to be the wrong decision for the wrong reasons," said Fairfax Supervisor T. Dana Kauffman (D-Lee), who is also on the Metro board. "Ten years from now, I regret my son may pick up a planning text where Fairfax's long-awaited rail extension is highlighted as a failed attempt at service and economic development. It can't only be about the here and now."

What's the point of doing something halfway, even if it is cheaper? These lines are expected to be there for 100 years or more, and there's no sense in thinking only about getting it done as cheaply as possible if it sacrifices potential to make a great place.

For a few weeks, I've been meaning to blog about the Rosslyn, Virginia Business Improvement District and their new magazine, and one of the cover stories in the current issue. It's about the planning process for the Rosslyn subway station, how the station has made a huge difference to Rosslyn, but that major differences of opinion about how the station should function, and even if there should be a station at all, existed during the planning for the subway system.

I thought that was interesting because of the parallels to the current planning process for the Dulles extension. That 30+ years later, the lessons are ignored. Talking with the Arlington County Manager, Ron Carlee, at the Arlington County Fair a few weeks ago, he mentioned that "Arlington lost population in the 1970s. It wasn't until the Metro started running that our population started to pick back up." (paraphrased)

There are many problems with how the Dulles Corridor Transit subway extension program is being conducted. Not being privy to how things work at WMATA, I don't really know, but this project isn't being run by WMATA, but by the Dulles Corridor Rail group leading the project. I think that's a mistake for a number of reasons, but specifically because they only focus on expanding service from the Falls Church Metro Station, and don't really think about broader regional issues.

1. As part of the planning for this service, adding capacity to cross the Potomac River into DC should be included in the planning, preparation, and construction of this service. It isn't.

2. I met a member of the Sierra Club Transportation Committee last night, and he suggests a different approach to how this service should be conceptualized.

Given all the stops between downtown Washington and Dulles, it will take a long time on the subway to get to the Airport, so he suggests that an express service with limited stops be developed, to perhaps a newly created downtown station (I suggest that one could be created between the Farragut North and Farragut West stations, to link the blue, orange, and red lines, getting Virginia to pay for it).

An advantage of this idea is that between Rosslyn and Downtown, it would add two more track lanes, providing redundancy and additional capacity downtown.

It could be extended beyond as well, or go into DC at Georgetown--very very very expensive, but hey, let's be bold, oh we can't be bold, because broader considerations aren't on the planning table, because this isn't a WMATA-planned project.
Rendering of how an aerial subway line might look in the Tysons Corner area.

Note to transit planners, you can see how aerial subway lines look at the northern end of the RFK Stadium parking lots. It's not very attractive.

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