Neither the metro or the lightrail reaches Penn. I don't know who designed the routes. Better connections between DC and BWI would better link the cities but they can't even maintain a bus line. Meanwhile, there's a billion dollar for the Silver line...
Did you just claim DC public transit is good? Wow. Coherent bus lines are few and far between. Light rail is non-existent. And the Metro is falling apart at the seems... Prone to excessive delays. Entire lines are brought down for extended periods to perform decades of deferred maintenance. There's no ring routes - to get from Dulles to Rockville, you have to go all the way downtown and back out again. The system was built without consideration for express lines. And neither of the DC airports are on the same line as Union Station.
The loss of the W&OD railway was a major failure of foresight IMHO. It collapsed for the same reason most local rail systems collapsed around that time: automobiles ate their lunch.
Now the local government is spending billions to build the silver line expansion more or less parallel to the W&OD trail, except that it doesn't go as far. The stations locations for the Silver Line are not very good. They bypass the downtown areas of Reston, Herndon, and Ashburn (such as it is) so the rail lines can be built in the middle of the toll road. Only a couple of the Tysons Corner stops really make much sense. Even the Dulles Airport stop is a quarter mile from the terminal.
But really they didn't have the option of running it through town without buying out loads of expensive property (and no doubt a whole lot of politically unpopular eminent domain use) and spending decades in court fighting over it.
Having lived in both Seattle and DC... this is wrong, at least comparing those two. DC managed to build a new line out to Dulles with others in the works, Seattle's light rail is a joke if you're trying to use it for more than a straight line through the city.
A common misconception people have about the DC metro is that it belongs to DC, but the abbreviation WMATA has nothing to do with DC for a reason. Maryland, Virginia, and I believe even the Federal Govt have to be a part of any changes that happen there. Given that, it's an absolute wonder that anything works.
The DC metro is ridiculous. I'm cynical enough to think that the only way the Silver Line would have been done faster would have been to shutdown DCA so politicians would be forced to use Dulles. Even then they would probably just have drivers.
IIRC, there are issues with the concrete used on the new platforms too.
> That and I'm still hoping they extend the line out to Dulles so we'll finally live in a fully connected urban area that befits the density of NoVA and D.C.
IMO, as another denizen of the D.C. area, the Silver Line, once completed, will not fully connect the D.C. area. There are other developed areas that will still not be reachable.
Take the 28 corridor, for instance: home to the NRO, a bunch of defense contractors, tech companies, the Dulles Expo Center, the Air and Space Museum, and a lot of residential and office space. This region will still not be connected. Going up and down 28 itself is something that almost certainly has to be done by car; I don't know of many (or any) buses that would enable one to get from, say, Centreville to Reston.
The Silver Line was built to serve the single largest commuter destination in all of Virginia. At that scale, rail transit is cost effective. Rail transit wouldn't make sense for a smaller scale development like the one described in the article. At this scale, dedicated bus lanes would make more sense and would be much, much cheaper than rail.
I said light rail (trams, streetcars) is non-existent. There is a test line in South DC, but nothing that’s actually useful for commuting or getting across the city.
My wife tried to use Metro for her Reston->downtown commute. It was a disaster - rail delays made it completely untenable. Then she tried the bus. It was more consistent, but overcrowded. She ended up driving 4/5 days because it was faster, cheaper, and more consistent.
The kind of money for public transit that would alleviate congestion on I95 (the proximate cause of yesterdays nightmare) has never ever been on the table. It would never get through Richmond or Annapolis.
As nice as expanded rail travel would be between cities, there are a lot of cities that are set up for cars and I was disappointed there doesn't seem to be much if any money in Biden's plan for creation and expansion of subway lines.
Even cities that have subway systems, they're in desperate need of new lines. Washington DC and Chicago spring to mind, since their systems could benefit greatly from simply adding an outer loop line. They both suffer from many lines where you have to go into the center to get back out again. The dream for the silver line was to connect the spokes in DC but I know of no real projects in Chicago. It would be a dream to have a map like this in Chicago[1]
I'm glad that Musk's proposed line was chased out the state. The Blue line needed expansion to allow for express lines to the airport, importantly with a few stops in between like a better planned purple line. Chicago did NOT need a 20 dollar a trip vanity project train that only went from O'Hare to the loop so that tourists and the wealthy could have a convenient private line to avoid all the poors. [2]
On the cost side, you’re comparing apples and oranges: building through downtown Boston in a tunnel compared to building through exurban Virginia above ground on an existing right of way.
A better point of comparison to the Silver Line is the inter-county connector in MD. Both built in the 2010s. $127 million per mile, which includes land acquisition costs because it wasn’t built along an existing right of way like the Silver Line.
You’re also completely off on the ridership side. Because rail only takes you on inflexible routes, actual ridership is low except in dense downtown cores. The Silver Line operates nowhere near capacity. Silver Line ridership is under 17,000 passengers per day. The inter county connector averages 30-40,000. So more than double the ridership for half the per mile cost.
Check out the Silver Line extension to the DC metro as a counter point [1]. Something like $7B to run rail 25 miles. And, who knows what the maintenance will be. For large sections of it, they had to run the tracks over the roads. So, now, there are these hulking, eternal masses of concrete that run through the sub-cities along the route.
Every day that I see its ongoing construction, I wish someone would just turn off the project are redirect the funds to improving infrastructure to support self-driving vehicles.
He explains it quite well. Light rail (and heavy rail too) is luxury public transit. Lower income people can’t afford to live near the stops. (The median income of DC Metro riders on most stations is well into the six figures.) Moreover, because rail is so expensive, you can’t build enough of it where it’s not going to rapidly increase surrounding property values, or really provide great coverage into low income neighborhoods. Bus service doesn’t have any of those downsides.
At the same time, rail sucks up huge amounts of money that could be spent on better and more frequent bus service instead.
I lived in Vienna, VA for a while, so I'm pretty familiar with all the failings of WMATA. And there are many. But...and it's a big "but", if you've lived in any major non-coastal city in the US you might think that DC's Metrorail is at least a public rail system, which is better than many cities have.
It's sad that in the US, you have to take what you can get, and the reasons why the US doesn't have good public transportation have been discussed here ad nauseum, so I won't even flog that dead horse again.
DC area has spent bazonga-bucks OMG amounts of money to keep doing these kinds of expansion projects.
The silver line snakes way out through Virginia, for a pretty (very) small fraction of riders every day & a handful of people going to IAD (Dulles) airport. The Purple Line has started snaking around the beltway, at least for the northern MD parts that were still willing to fund & try, but has dragged on, slated originally to open last year & still at least 4 years out & crazy over cost. It seems unlikely to make a sea change difference, but perhaps!! We want to believe, maybe after a lot of time. DC started building a new streetcar network, and seemingly gave up after realizing fixed infrastructure like this was insanely expensive and prone to constant blockage.
Most American cities highly subsidize transit. Going to fully subsidized is not really a major hurt. It's a kind of easy action we can just do, for little real pain. Much less pain than many of the expansive would be micro-mega-projects, that probably in most cases will be massive budget items with decades of debt, with only very very very long term development benefits. In DC, few of our transit systems have capacity problems. Our citywide network is quite good, very well connnected whatever direction you want in most places.
The proposal that we add more busses, that we build new lines: it feels wildly out of touch, like it's prescribing someone elses solution, that doesn't make sense here. This is a good sensible next step for DC, to make what we have work much better for many, especially those who can most benefit.
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