Washington City Paper City Desk blog entry on retail

"Shopping for Retail I: Silver Line Connection," is worth a read. The piece is by Mark Jenkins, who in the late 1980s and early 1990s wrote a weekly column in the City Paper called Cityscape. Mark also wrote a cover story in the early 1990s which was the first proposal for a circumferential "Purple Line" to connect the ends of the various lines of the WMATA subway.


This image of a Purple Line is from the Sierra Club.

In the piece, Mark obliquely mentions the separated blue line subway proposal, which was scuttled in 2003. It was proposed as part of WMATA's "Core Capacity Study." At the same time as the cessation of WMATA subway expansion planning, authority and responsiblity for subway expansion devolved to the individual jurisdictions. That means that for this proposal to come to life, it has to be initiated by DC.

Washington Post graphic.