Washington Football Team buys land in Woodbridge/Prince William County: A good opportunity to extend the Blue Line subway to Quantico and the Purple Line from New Carrollton to Springfield, Virginia

 I am no fan of providing lots of public monies to professional sports teams for stadiums and arenas ("Revisiting "Framework of characteristics that support successful community development in association with the development of professional sports facilities""), and I really am no fan of the now named Washington Commanders, because the team is run so poorly ("A new football stadium for the Washington "Commanders" | Virginia versus Maryland (and hopefully not DC)").  

I definitely don't want them to return to DC ("Been to Largo lately? Sports teams often aren't very good partners...," "Stadiums and arenas redux: Mayor Bowser still wants the area NFL team to relocate to DC").

Today's reports ("Commanders acquire 200 acres of land in Va. for potential new stadium," Washington Post) that the Washington Commanders bought land in Woodbridge/Prince William County, Virginia makes me happy that perhaps they won't be trying to return to DC, because DC could do so much better with redevelopment around RFK Stadium than via a football team with minimal activity.

The proposed site doesn't have high frequency rail transit and would be a crappy, long drive for a significant number of the patrons of the team, adding congestion to the I-95 freeway, which is already seriously congested.  

Frankly, I think sports teams should be required, in areas with decent transit systems, to locate where there is already high frequency rail transit.  But that isn't the way it is, at least in the DC area.

(Examples of stadiums and arenas with great transit service include Madison Square Garden and Barclays Arena in NYC, and to a lesser extent the Mets and Yankee Stadiums, Capital One Arena in DC and to a lesser extent Washington Nationals Stadium, AT&T Park in San Francisco, Wrigley Field in Chicago.  Other facilities may not be in transit meccas, but at least the transit agency plans for better service, like Metrolink in Southern California with special services for hockey and baseball teams. Etc.)

But, not that Metrorail is operated very well ("What to do about DC area Metrorail?") there is the opportunity if the Commanders were to move to this location, that the public transit system could be extended to Woodbridge.

Sure Woodbridge is 20 some miles from DC so extending the Blue Line Metrorail there wouldn't be so much about supporting intensive development as much as supporting polycentrism (see the book Cities in Full) and transit-enabled sprawl.

But it's an intensifying area and "deserves" better transit.  Why not use the stadium as a way to move transit there as well?

It would be good to provide PWC with intensification opportunities, and a more frequent public rail transit alternative to I-95 (yes, there is already the Virginia Railway Express, but heavy rail could operate more frequently).

In "A "Transformational Projects Action Plan" for the Metrorail Blue Line," which was a response to a 2020 Washington Post article, "Metro Blue Line extension into Prince William? Virginia lawmakers want a study," I said you could extend the Blue Line not just to Woodbridge, but to the Quantico Naval Base, which is a significant traffic generation in the I-95 Corridor.

It's about 14 miles from Downtown DC to Franconia Springfield Metrorail Station, the terminal station of the west end of the Blue Line.

And 23 miles from there to Quantico.  You could even do a short branch to Fort Belvoir.  

Note that separately, in a conceptual transit map of integrated and extended rail transit services in the Washington Metropolitan Area, created by Paul Meissner and myself, we proposed extending the Yellow Line to Fort Belvoir, but we didn't think of extending the Blue Line to Woodbridge and Daly City, where Potomac Mills is.

Fairfax County would probably like an extended Yellow Line down Route 1, and from a transit expansion planning standpoint, it'd make sense to do both or at least study both, with the Blue Line in two to three phases.  Phase 1/2 to Woodbridge and Potomac Mills, and Phase 3 to Quantico.

Note that wrt more comprehensive transit planning for Northern Virginia, see the 2017 piece:

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

Since then, at least under the previous governor, Virginia made a significant commitment to railroad transit expansion across the state, but especially the I-95 corridor.

Now 37 miles from Downtown DC to Quantico is way longer than heavy rail should probably be.  

Then again, the BART system is being extended to San Jose and Santa Clara, which is 54 miles from San Francisco.  Both BART and increasingly Metrorail, function as longer distance commuter rail.

But theoretically, except that Congress because of Republican intransigence is dysfunctional, the federal government could chip in on this separately and as an addition to the normal federal transit funding process, because of the access provided to the Quantico Navy Base.

"A "Transformational Projects Action Plan" for the Metrorail Blue Line" suggested DC should go along with Virginia on this--despite the length and distance from the core--in order to get the funding to move forward either a Separated Silver Line or Separated  Blue Line in DC, to add service to Georgetown, extra capacity in DC's core, more service to Union Station and more stations on the H Street corridor further east.

Note that since I wrote that piece, WMATA came up with their own proposal, which focuses on extending blue line service more to National Harbor in Prince George's County ("Backwardness of transportation and land use planning: National Harbor, Prince George's County, Maryland | Why isn't high capacity transit access required from the outset?").

This is the WMATA proposal, which (1) does provide a Georgetown station; (2) redundancy and new stations in the core; (3) a new line connection to Union Station, which would support station expansion plans.  

But (4) instead of going further east, (5) instead it provides more service in Southeast DC, in areas that aren't particularly populated, (6) service to National Harbor; and (7) and then across the Wilson Bridge to Alexandria, creating a kind of interior circular line.

I still think that National Harbor service could be best met by further extending the Purple Line light rail from New Carrollton to Alexandria.  

Now I would say, with the possibility of a Blue Line extension because of an exurban football stadium in Prince William County, extend the Purple Line from New Carrollton to the Franconia-Springfield Station, which is already proposed.

Note that WMATA doesn't do light rail planning.  So they aren't doing cost comparisons between subway and light rail and service to National Harbor.

Again, it makes sense to do (1) an extended Blue Line to Woodbridge/Dale City/Quantico; (2) a separated Blue Line in DC; (3) but with service east of Union Station, rather than south of Union Station; and (4) an extension of the Purple Line from New Carrollton to Springfield, to provide service to National Harbor, while connecting the Purple Line to more segments of the Metrorail system as well as Virginia Railway Express.

Note too that the Silver Line network plan, the Purple Line network plan ("Codifying the complementary transit network improvements and planning initiatives recommended in the Purple Line writings") and this piece specifically, "A new backbone for the regional transit system: merging the MARC Penn and VRE Fredericksburg Lines," call for merging the Virginia based VRE and the Maryland based MARC railroad systems, starting with the Fredericksburg VRE Line and the MARC Penn Line .

MARC could also use this as the fulcrum to extend MARC connections in some way to Newark/Wilmington Delaware ("A "Transformational Projects Action Plan" for a statewide passenger railroad program in Maryland").