Tysons (Corner) 10 Years after the plan to make it more walkable: the necessity of implementation mechanisms

Sunday's Washington Post has a local op-ed, "Ten years into redevelopment, is Tysons what we envisioned?," about the planning effort in Tysons (Corner) to make it less car-centric and more walkable and livable.  (Tysons is the original Edge City discussed in the book by Joel Garreau.)

Starting in 2011 I wrote a bunch of pieces about the Silver Line in Fairfax (and Loudoun) Counties making the point that it wasn't so much about providing access to Dulles Airport but more about repositioning this swath of the counties for 21st Century land use preferences and trends--e.g., car centric office parks are on the wane, etc.

-- "Short term vs. long term thinking: transit, the Washington Examiner, Fairfax/Loudoun Counties vs. DC," 2011
-- "Without the right planning "controls" you can't stop change: Loudoun County and rail service in Northern Virginia," 2012
-- "Silver line reshaping commercial office market in Fairfax County," 2015

From the 2011 piece:

See this presentation from 2004, "The Future of Tysons Corner: A Fifteen-Point Blueprint for the New “Downtown” of Northern Virginia" by the University of Maryland Smart Growth Center.

BUT, the developers there are thinking even longer term and on a bigger stage, about how they will be able to create an area that is fully competitive with and preferable to Downtown DC.

How Reston, already walkable, with the addition of transit, will be an ever more competitive and preferable area, especially for those people and business proprietors who are afraid of cities. (E.g., how companies like Hilton and Northrup Grumman are relocating to the Virginia suburbs, not to DC.)

This makes yesterday's editorial in the Examiner, "Virginia's white elephant needs to be put down" (the article is no longer available online) which advocates for the shutting down of the Silver Line subway line, absolutely hilarious because it is so disconnected from the reality that is being shaped and constructed and built by the developers.  

Note that the Urban Land Institute has some important publications on the redevelopment of suburban areas (which I find to be relevant to urban intensification as well):

-- Ten Principles for Reinventing Suburban Business Districts
-- Ten Principles for Reinventing America's Suburban Strips
-- Ten Principles Rethinking the Mall

Suburban land use planning as the hypersuperblock.  The Post op-ed argues, as do comments on other stories (e.g., "With high-rises and one ‘hidden gem,’ an urban center is sprouting in Tysons West"), that the area remains a disaster for biking, walking, and intra-district mobility, including transit.

That being said, even the best of plans have a hard time "taming" suburban land use away from the car and towards the individual.  Places built during the period of the metropolitan city ("Transportation and urban form," Peter Muller) were designed to be hospitable to the car.

In urban planning, we discuss how blocks in the center city went from a more human scaled size to superblocks in the suburbs.

Superblock doesn't even begin to describe the nature of trying to plan for walkability in Edge Cities.

The scale is based on the car, not people.

The places are adjacent to major highways, have hypersuperblocks, campuses many acres in size, massive parking lots, buildings fronted by parking, and arterials that are 8 lanes or more wide.

Usually there aren't internal connections between lots, so to get from one place to another, even if they are next door to each other, you have to drive out to the main arterial.


Urban scenes at eye level, Part One.  From "Close encounters with buildings" by Jan Gehl, Lotte Johansen Kaefer and Solvejg Reigstad.  Urban Design International 11: 29-47 (2006). 

Retrofitting such places so that they can be refocused towards pedestrians (and bicyclists and transit) is a challenge of heroic scale.  I can't think of any place I know of that has managed to do this.

Buckhead Collection vision map for placemaking improvements.

One of the comments references the Buckhead district of Atlanta, which is another edge city designed and built around automobility.   Both Tysons and Buckhead have created plans for placemaking improvements.

The Buckhead plan was done by Glatting Jackson (now AECOM) by the group then under the helm of parks planner David Barth.  I've mentioned both the plan for Buckhead and David Barth many times in entries over the years.

-- Buckhead Greenspace Action Plan webpage (archived)
-- Buckhead Collection planning documents, Livable Buckhead
-- Buckhead Collection Implementation Action Plan
-- Buckhead Trails Plan

But (I've never been to Buckhead) apparently both places are nowhere near implementing those improvements in a substantive way.

Public improvement districts as funding mechanisms for access and placemaking improvements.  This raises the point I've made previously about creating "Public Improvement Districts" in association with transit infrastructure additions--both at the scale of individual stations and the entire line--to bring about horizontal and vertical mobility access improvements.

-- "Revisiting creating Public Improvement Districts in transit station catchment areas," 2020
-- "(In many places) Public improvement districts ought to be created as part of transit station development process: the east side of NoMA station as an example," 2016
-- "NoMA revisited: business planning to develop community," 2011
-- Urban Design Manhattan is a 1969 report from the Regional Plan Association, which looks systematically at vertical and horizontal movement in association with transit stations

The big lesson from Tysons is that you need to prime the stage for placemaking improvements by creating funding mechanisms in advance of the opening of the transit infrastructure, to lay the foundation for the changes you desire, rather than being content with the process taking many decades through the drip drip drip of trickle down improvements.

I also call this concept "Transportation Renewal Districts."

-- "Purple line planning in suburban Maryland as an opportunity to integrate place and people focused initiatives into delivery of new transit systems," 2014
-- "Quick follow up to the Purple Line piece about creating a Transportation Renewal District and selling bonds to fund equitable development," 2014

In any case, using tax increment financing to create a pool of money to make these investments is a necessary "priming" action to yield the kinds of land use reproduction called for in plans.

Implementation organizations.  Money isn't enough.  In my writings about best practice revitalization and what I now call "Transformational Projects Action Planning," I argue that to be successful, programs have six integrated components.

I drew the conclusion that successful revitalization programs, especially in those cities that were working to overturn serious disadvantages, were comprised of these elements:

A commitment to the development and production of a broad, comprehensive, visionary, and detailed revitalization plan/s (Bilbao, Hamburg, Liverpool);

the creation of innovative and successful implementation organizations, with representatives from the public sector and private firms, to carry out the program.  Typically, the organizations have some distance from the local government so that the plan and program aren't subject to the vicissitudes of changing political administrations, parties and representatives (Bilbao, Hamburg, Liverpool, Helsinki);

strong accountability mechanisms that ensure that the critical distance provided by semi-independent implementation organizations isn't taken advantage of in terms of deleterious actions (for example Dublin's Temple Bar Cultural Trust was amazingly successful but over time became somewhat disconnected from local government and spent money somewhat injudiciously, even though they generated their own revenues--this came to a head during the economic downturn and the organization was widely criticized; in response the City Council decided to fold the TBCT and incorporate it into the city government structure, which may have negative ramifications for continued program effectiveness as its revenues get siphoned off and political priorities of elected officials shift elsewhere);

funding to realize the plan, usually a combination of local, regional, state, and national sources, and in Europe, "structural adjustment" and other programmatic funding from the European Regional Development Fund and related programs is also available (Hamburg, as a city-state, has extra-normal access to funds beyond what may normally be available to the average city);

integrated branding and marketing programs to support the realization of the plan (Hamburg, Vienna, Liverpool, Bilbao, Dublin);

flexibility and a willingness to take advantage of serendipitous events and opportunities and integrate new projects into the overall planning and implementation framework (examples include Bilbao's "landing" of a branch of the Guggenheim Museum and the subsequent creation of a light rail system to complement its new subway system, Liverpool City Council's agreement with a developer to create the Liverpool One mixed use retail, office, and residential development in parallel to the regeneration plan and the hosting of the Capital of Culture program in 2008, and how multifaceted arts centers were developed in otherwise vacated properties rented out cheaply by their owners in Dublin, Helsinki, and Marseille).

I realize now that what I then called "visionary plans" are what I now call "transformational projects action plans."

Plan + Implementation Organization + Funding: You need all three.  Clearly, in Buckhead, there are implementation organizations like the Buckhead Community Improvement District, and advocacy groups like Livable Buckhead.  But they must lack the money they need to implement projects at scale.  (The CID is funded through an annual property tax assessment upcharge, but for the most part that covers annual operations, not capital improvements.)

(Maybe Tysons needs a diversity plan too.)

In Tysons, they have the Tysons Partnership, which is the logical organization to foster implementation of the placemaking and mobility improvements.

There is lots of discussion on the Tysons Partnership website about the planned and desirable changes to the area, so clearly they have the commitment.

Maybe they lack a sense of urgency and definitely lack the financing mechanism at present to pull it off.

New transportation infrastructure as a way to launch complementary improvements across the transit network.   Thinking about the transit network similarly, this entry about the Silver Line  outlines a set of initiatives that could have been created simultaneously with the construction and opening of the Silver Line, to improve its success as well as the success of the broader transit network.

-- "Using the Silver Line as the priming event, what would a transit network improvement program look like for NoVA?," 2017

Microtransit/intra-district transit service.  One thing I failed to include in the Silver Line (or Purple Line) list was intra-district transit shuttles or similar programs to move people to and from transit stations without people having to drive.  (Fairfax County specifically "banned" the creation of public parking garages at most stations to foster sustainable mobility access conditions.)

The free Freebee shuttle system operates in various South Florida cities, usually within Downtowns and/or beach areas.

Past blog entries on the Tempe Orbit bus system ("Earth Day and intra-neighborhood transit," 2009) and various intra-district shuttle programs ("Intra-neighborhood (tertiary) transit revisited because of new San Diego service," 2016; "Why microtransit isn't likely to be a source of great profits for private firms: labor," 2019) outline how I think such a program should look.

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Note that the White Flint district of Montgomery County has similar issues, although the scale is not nearly as massive.