Northern Virginia:
“When a co-worker asks if you take Metro to work and you say
‘yes,’ are you leaving something out? For tens of thousands of Metrorail
riders, the transit commute starts in a car. Metro was built to be a car
magnet. The rail stations were supposed to suck up car commuters in the suburbs
and spit them out as rail riders in downtown Washington, where they would walk
or take buses for the short trip to their offices. That was a very green
strategy for downtown, but not so much for the suburbs.
It spared the District and parts of Arlington County and
Alexandria some of the agony that would have resulted from building more
highways to funnel traffic into the dense core of the region. But in the
decades since this hub-and-spoke rail system was planned, suburbanites have
gotten the notion that they also could live in communities, rather than in
random gatherings of bedrooms and parking garages.
Hence, plans to retrofit suburban centers such as Tysons
Corner and Silver Spring. Across the region, we see townhouses and apartments
rising from every available space near Metro stations…
But car magnetism is a powerful force, as I found out during
my online discussion with readers on Monday. My response to one traveler’s
point about the role of parking garages in creating congestion included this: ‘Metrorail
also provides an enormous incentive to drive by surrounding its suburban
stations with massive parking garages.’”
~Writes Robert Thomson of the Washington Post
Click here to read this insightful column
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