It just seems like common sense: If you cram more offices and housing into a place, you’ll get more people, more traffic and more congestion. That’s the sentiment animinating the opposition to increased density in Tysons Corner.
But common sense isn’t always right. In an example of the kind of reporting we should see more of, the Washington Post illuminates the Tysons Corner debate in a Feb. 18 article by looking at the Rosslyn-Ballston Corridor in Arlington. The surge in development along the Corridor, which is served by METRO, has produced relatively little extra automobile traffic. Skeptics respond that Tysons is different from Arlington: Increasing density, even if the METRO is built, will not have the same impact.
True, Tysons is different. It may present special challenges. That just means they the County will have to work at it — just like Arlington did. The Rosslyn-Ballston Corridor did not just emerge like Venus on the half-shell. Arlington has worked tirelessly for decades to make its METRO Corridor work. Says the Post:
It took Arlington decades, they said, to draw up plans, win support from nearby residents and then attract the kind of development they were hoping for.
Winning local support was achieved, officials said, only after countless meetings and pledges that Arlington would stick to a “bull’s-eye” approach, limiting the tallest buildings to a quarter-mile radius from rail stations and not encroaching on neighborhoods. To keep up support over time, the county instituted parking limits and traffic-calming methods on nearby streets.
Employees and residents in the corridor are encouraged to stay out of their cars through parking limits, transit subsidies, a county bus system, bike paths and pedestrian-friendly street designs. The county has the advantage of having control over the design of its secondary streets, an authority that in most Virginia counties is held by the state.
“It’s not just one policy but a whole series of things,” said Dennis Leach, the county’s transportation chief. “This is not something you do overnight. Arlington’s been at this 30 years, and not everything’s perfect. We have a lot more to do.”
There are no simple solutions. There are no painless remedies. Devising functional land use patterns and transportation systems will take unstinting effort. But the end result is a system that does work. What we have now will never work, no matter how much money we dump into it.
(Hat tip to Nova MiddleMan for bringing this article to my attention.)