DC region: Transit station density

Paris Metro map.

There is a nice post in DCist about Whitehurst Freeway. See "Tear It Down?" Many of the comments strongly support keeping the freeway, which shouldn't be a surprise. Change is scary.

And the piece makes a very good point, dumping 43,000 cars onto K Street or M Street would not help anyone... All the more reason to do transit-shed planning. Where do the trips come from, who makes them, how often, what alternatives are there?

As I said in my presentation the other night in response to a question:

What do I care about how long it takes for someone from Rockville to get to DC? (But it does matter where these 43,000 cars end up... if they end up on other DC roads.)

Now, I was grandstanding, making a point--that we have to balance the needs and demands of long distance commuters who treat the subway like a railroad versus the needs and demands of city residents (and Arlington residents too) for intra-city mobility.

Steve Belmont's Cities in Full has an excellent chapter on "Recentralizing Transportation," including some discussion of the polycentric pro-deconcentration WMATA system.

He counters the WMATA example with a discussion of the Paris Metro, which has 14 lines with many stations, and as a result 90% of Paris lies within 1/4 mile of a subway station.

He calculates the density of subway stations:

City of Paris -- 6.8 stations/square mile
Manhattan Island (NYC) -- 4.6 stations/square mile
City of Washington -- 0.67 stations/square mile (my number not his)

Note that my number is higher than Belmont's number, 0.54, but that's because I am calculating the number only for DC proper, and I don't include the 6 square miles of water. The number for Montgomery County, including Takoma and Friendship Heights (both counted as DC, but also bordering Montgomery--Friendship Heights has an entrance in Montgomery County, Takoma does not, although Ride On buses alight at the Takoma station, which is in DC) ....

Montgomery County -- 1 station/39 square miles = 0.02 stations/square mile
Montgomery County excluding the Ag. Preserve -- 1 station/27.46 square miles = 0.03
Prince George's (double counting Capitol Heights) -- 1 station/32.46 square miles = 0.03
Fairfax (double counting E. Falls Church and Van Dorn) -- 1 station/66.5 square miles = 0.015
Arlington -- 1 station/2.36 square miles = 0.42 stations/square mile.
WMATA Subway Map, Washington, DC.

Now I clarified my point in my response, that Paris has 14 lines and the DC region has 5 lines. We need more lines. Streetcars will be an important addition to the mix but:

1. Why has the DC Department of Transportation cut the number of proposed streetcar lines from 8 to 4? (there's been no public discussion)
2. We still need to add heavy rail capacity in the center city, through expansion, to address demand, service, and redundancy issues. Extending lines such as new track to Dulles Airport or an extension of the Green Line from Greenbelt to BWI Airport only makes this more crucial.

Read District of Columbia Transportation Vision Plan - presentation 9/12/2006 to Greater Washington Board of Trade delivered by DDOT Director Michelle L. Pourciau.
Will this car end up in Anacostia or on H Street? Trio streetcar on the left, being constructed for Washington, DC at the Ostrava Transit Shop in the Czech Republic. Flickr photo by PortlandTransport.

Index Keywords: mobility