A Tale of Two Counties
"Smart" community design can alleviate traffic conjestion if the mix of residential, office and retail space is supported by a well-designed transit system.

By Robert Burke
At the Vienna Metrorail station in Fairfax County, the car is clearly king. The station is surrounded by vehicles in the two surface lots and a parking garage that are filled by commuters every morning. For people standing on the passenger platform, it’s like being in the middle of an interstate highway — because that’s exactly where they are. The station sits in the fenced median of Interstate 66.

Just a few stops away, the five underground Metrorail stations in the more urbane Rosslyn to Ballston corridor in Arlington County provide a stark contrast. When commuters on the Ballston station escalator rise to N. Stuart Street, they are greeted by the Tivoli Gourmet & Pastry. This street-level shop is in an office building constructed almost directly on top of the station. On a nearby corner are the offices of Qwest, an Internet communications company. Across Fairfax Drive is the headquarters of The Nature Conservancy. Wide sidewalks are lined with ground-level shops such as dry cleaners, copy centers and restaurants. Nearby are office and apartment buildings, some 20 stories tall. Two blocks away is the Ballston Commons mall.

What makes this five-stop stretch of Metro stations special, says a longtime county leader, is how its mix of residential, office and retail and a well-designed transit system keep traffic congestion down, despite higher densities.

"Part of our thought was to make really good use of this," says State Sen. Mary Margaret Whipple, D-Arlington, who served 12 years on the Arlington Board of Supervisors. "It’s a major investment of tax dollars, so let’s use it for economic development, let’s use it as an important part of our transportation network. And I think it does work."

Chris Miller of the Piedmont Environmental Council says the Metro is the region’s only transportation system with excess capacity. "Right now, most of the trains leave most of the stations nearly empty. By getting more people to use Metro, there would be fewer cars on the roads. It would also reduce the need to subsidize Metro’s operations, which currently cost the state and local governments in Virginia nearly $150 million a year."

Fairfax’s approach in Vienna of using Metro as a commuter tool only is an example of what not to do, Miller says. "The development in Fairfax has occurred in places where there is no mass transit and hasn’t occurred in places where there is. Fairfax has concentrated its development in Tysons, along the Route 28 corridor and in other places where no mass transit is available. This means that everyone who works or shops in those locations has to use the road network."

Along the Rosslyn-to-Ballston corridor, the highest densities and tallest buildings are within walking distance of the Metro stations. From there they taper in size and density and melt into residential areas.

In addition, each of the five stations has its own focus. Rosslyn’s Metro is surrounded by high-density office and business centers. The Courthouse stop is the county’s government center. Clarendon is planned as an urban village, while the Virginia Square/GMU station is surrounded by cultural and educational centers. The Ballston/Marymount University station is developing as the "new downtown."

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It almost didn’t happen this way. Metro designers initially planned the Orange line to run down the median of I-66 in Arlington as it does in Fairfax, but Arlington leaders convinced them to move it underground beneath the aging Wilson Boulevard corridor. The boulevard was ripe for redevelopment, Whipple says. "It was older and run-down. Maybe in Fairfax, it wasn’t old and run-down enough. But Fairfax made a major mistake. They either should have run the Metro to Tysons Corner or they should have put dense development around the Metro stations."

That’s easier said than done, according to Sharon Bulova, a member of the Fairfax Board of Supervisors. Before the Vienna station was built, houses were already nearby. Dropping high-density development on those residents would have been a tough sell. "It’s really different when you’re dealing with people who have made their home," she says. "You’re changing the character of the place around them and affecting the quality of their life. And that’s not fair."

"That is the myth and a distortion of what happened," says Risse. "The reason that the Metro station was located at Vienna, rather than Tysons Corner, is because there were 800 acres of vacant land designated for transit-related development. The federal government required transit-related development around the stations in exchange for the federal match of 80 percent."

However, county officials departed from the plan, first placing a high school and park on the property and then zoning the rest at densities not designed to support mass transit. "Now there are only 200 acres around the station either vacant or in need of recycling," Risse says.

Whipple says it was a difficult process for Arlington residents, too. "I know they had at least 75 meetings in neighborhoods. Essentially the citizens of Arlington said we want to have very good services, and we don’t want to pay really high taxes. And so we accept high-rise density around Metro stations to increase our tax base." Some residents opposed the plan, Whipple says, but in the end it prevailed "because it had been such an open process. The community knew what the tradeoffs were, and they went for it." It happened, she says, because "county leaders at the time were visionary."

Even now, says Miller, the best solution for Fairfax’s traffic problems may be to follow the Arlington model. "The amount of land affected by compact, transit-oriented development at Metro stations would be far less than the land that would be consumed by new roads and expanded highways. Consider the area of impact around the I-95 mixing bowl project and multiply it by the 12 interchanges along the Beltway in Fairfax County. Compare that to simply rezoning land and building on top of Metro. Which would be easier?"

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Here’s the vision for new mass transit in Northern Virginia in 2020: 46 more miles of Metrorail, extending to Dulles, Centerville and Fort Belvoir, and an additional 33 miles of light rail as well as a network of new and widened highways. The $11 billion proposal was drafted by the 36-member Transportation Coordinating Council, which includes several elected officials from the region.

Gov. Jim Gilmore produced his own six-year plan in late August that included express bus service along the Dulles Access Road and extending Metro to Dulles via Tysons Corner, as well as replacing several I-66 interchanges.

Bulova, a TCC member, says the group increased the amount of transit spending as it worked on the 2020 draft, "realizing that we can’t just march into the next century widening and widening roads until there’s just asphalt." She says the plan’s mix of roads and transit fits the comprehensive plans already adopted by the localities. "You can call it a chicken or the egg situation. But what we have here is land-use patterns that have already been approved, and now we’re trying to build the kind of transportation system that’s going to support it."

Whipple agrees that momentum is building toward some action. But the issue is more complicated than where the roads and rails go. Housing costs are a big piece of the puzzle, she says. "I used to think that people wanted to move further out so that they could have a large home surrounded by a lot of woods," she says. But people are often buying the same size homes there that are available in Arlington. The difference is the cost. Arlington single-family houses can sell for $500,000 or more. "People are having to do this trade-off. ‘We’re going to get a nicer house if we live farther out. But we’re going to have to commute an hour each way. Is it worth it?’"

Stewart Schwartz of the Coalition for Smarter Growth agrees that the inner suburbs need a better supply of affordable housing. "People value the mix of uses available in places like Arlington and Alexandria. The solution is to provide more places like that. It will bring home prices down and make communities affordable to everyone."

Schwartz says the state should spend its money on new transit before it builds circumference roads in the outer suburbs. He hopes legislators will also change the state’s formula for funding transportation projects to put mass transit on equal footing with highway construction.

Funding mass transit is only part of the challenge, says Miller. Designing it well is another. Metro broke ground in October on a second parking garage at the Vienna Metro station that will add another 2,200 parking spaces. Miller and others say filling the land around the station with parking is the wrong approach, and they worry it will be repeated in proposed rail expansions in Northern Virginia. "The current design has to be significantly changed or it won’t have the intended effect," he says. "Fairfax has shown us that bad land-use design around mass transit doesn’t get people off the roads. That’s why Vienna needs parking for another 2,200 cars."