I normally let Bacon’s Rebellion e-zine contributors plug their own columns in this blog, but I’m making an exception today. I want to bring to readers’ attention Ed Risse’s column, “All Aboard!“, which takes a fresh look at the Tysons Corner heavy rail project.
The backdrop of Ed’s column is the controversy over Gov. Timothy M. Kaine’s decision, largely on the basis of practical funding considerations, to pursue an above-ground rail line rather than the underground rail line that many Fairfax County residents wanted. The rap against the above-ground rail line is that it would chop up Tysons Corner, disrupting the effort to reconfigure the business center as a connected, pedestrian-friendly, mixed-use community.
Not necessarily so, argues Risse. A “pyramid” development pattern, in which tall buildings and high densities are permitted above the Metro stations and taper off within a 1/4-mile radius, combined with Public Way Rights, which permit development above the Metro station and on publicly owned roadway around it, would create just as much connectivity for travelers as an underground station.
Plus, if I extrapolate from Ed’s reasoning correctly (Ed, please correct me if I go astray) a Pyramid/Public Way Rights approach would have a huge bonus: Because the public owns the rights of way, the public could reap some of the economic value created by the Metro presence to pay for construction of the rail line.
At full build-out, Risse calculates, the property within a 1/4-mile radius of a Metro station could be worth, at current prices, about $1.9 billion at each of the four Tysons Corner stations, for a total of $7.6 billion. (Important caveat: The number would be lower if we do a net present value analysis; such a huge volume of space would take years, if not decades, to absorb.) Compare that to the cost of extending the above-ground rail line through Tysons Corner: between $2.4 billion and $2.7 billion. Extracting the economic value from the publicly owned rights of way could cover most of the cost of building the rail line — and that doesn’t even include the option of tapping the value created for private land owners.
The column is “must” reading for anyone interested in the future of Rail to Tysons and Rail to Dulles.