Silver Line Delays Holding Up Tysons Corner Development

[marmar]

from WAMU, via WNYC's Transportation Nation:




The expected transformation over the next three decades of Tysons Corner — “America’s Next Great City” — is viewed as a potential model for turning suburbs into cities, for changing an area of large surface parking lots and wide roads into a city-grid street network of bike lanes, bus lanes, and pedestrian plazas surrounded by 20-story high rises and mixed-use development.

And it is all resting on the success of the Silver Line. But the transformation is on hold because the Silver Line has yet to arrive at Tysons, delayed by numerous mistakes in the final stages of construction.

There is no timetable for the Silver Line’s completion by contractor Bechtel and the agency overseeing the project, the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority. Meantime, the patience of the real estate developers who own the land around the four Metro stops in Tysons is wearing thin. They are waiting on the train.

A community on hold

The expected droves of new residents, office tenants, and shoppers and diners have yet to arrive. The estimated number of daily boardings at the four Silver Line stations in Tysons at the start of rail service is 16,300, with a total capacity exceeding 30,000, according to the final environmental impact statement. ...........................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.wnyc.org/story/silver-line-delays-holding-tysons-corner-development/

[grasswire]

1. Gee.

I last saw Tyson's Corner twenty years ago, and I thought it was built up then!

[Zambero]

2. Doesn't the Orange Line already go through there?

Or is this new one coming into TC from the south by way of lower Fairfax County? I rode the Red Line for years when living in Montgomery County. Loved the Metro.

[SheilaT]

3. Whoa! I had no idea there were plans to bring the Metro out to Tysons.

I worked out there in 1979/80, when it was just beginning the huge build up that now completely encompasses the area.

When I first moved to the DC area in the fall of 1968, they'd just begun construction on the Metro. There were many letters to the editor in the Washington Post, and a general consensus that this was a stupid project, that it would cost too much money and no one would ride it. The years of construction weren't fun. And the Metro station at DCA (National Airport and no, I will never call it anything else) was relocated in the hopes of having it completed by the Bicentennial.

I moved away in 1981. Nearly twenty years after that I was back on a visit, and in downtown DC, by which I mean at around 16th and K streets, during afternoon rush hour, I looked around and there were noticeably fewer cars than there had been forty years earlier. The Metro worked.

A few years ago after various changes in my life, I gave serious thought to moving b back to that area, in no small part because of the good public transportation. I decided to move elsewhere instead, to Santa Fe, NM, and one thing I do not like about living here is the lack of good public transportation. Whenever I move again, and it will happen, I'll go somewhere with busses and light rail and maybe a subway.

So hang in there, all of you who want to take the Silver line to Tysons. It will happen. And it will be worth the wait.