Silver Lining

Is more transit always better?

The other week I did something I’ve been planning to do for half a year—ride the recently opened extension of the D.C. Metro’s Silver Line all the way to its westernmost station. I met a friend—these things are always better with a wingman—and we rode out to Ashburn, in Loudoun County.

The Metrorail system, Washington, D.C.’s subway/commuter train system, is concentrated downtown, but today all of its lines terminate, at both ends, in Maryland or Virginia. Originally they terminated in the city itself, or at closer-in suburbs like Silver Spring and Arlington, but extensions over the years have brought final stations as far out as Rockville in Maryland and Reston in Virginia, far outside the Beltway.

The Reston station is served by the Silver Line, which opened in 2014 (though much of it shares track with preexisting lines) and was previously the final station. But there was a Silver Line Phase II, which would extend it all the way to Dulles Airport and out into the Loudoun County suburbs/exurbs.

This was supposed to happen years ago. Delays upon delays pushed its opening all the way out to late 2022, when the trains finally began to run. I know, roughly, what’s out there, because the Silver Line extension follows Virginia 267, one of the main routes through Loudoun County. But I wanted to celebrate the opening, and see this familiar route out the window of a train.

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We caught one of the seasonal cherry blossom trains, which was a nice start.

The station names, and the scenery, aren’t much, really: Innovation Center, Loudoun Gateway. They bring to mind luxurious but impersonal hotel lobbies.

Seeing the massive terminal of Dulles Airport out the railcar window did make me proud to live in Northern Virginia.

This should have happened decades ago, really. But better late than never.

We rode out to the new terminus, the Ashburn station. Ashburn was a town centuries ago, but its development as an outer D.C. suburb is fairly recent. Unfortunately, the Silver Line does not connect with any real pre-existing development around here. There’s One Loudoun, a mixed-use town center development, and the old town of Leesburg, with its own large suburban penumbra. Both of these sit on Virginia Route 7, which the Silver Line doesn’t follow at all in Loudoun County. (It follows 7 back in Fairfax County before splitting off to track 267.)

I was particularly curious what the pedestrian experience was like outside the Ashburn station. Could I say to my wife, “Hey, let’s ride to Ashburn and shop/eat/walk/whatever,” and not need a car or an additional bus trip?

Well, not really.

There’s a small mixed-use town center development to one side of the station called Loudoun Station, built ahead of the severely delayed rail extension. We were there in the middle of a weekday, which is probably why, but it definitely had that deserted, sort of movie-set feel. There was a playground with a few families hanging out, but there was also a mini amphitheater which was somewhat overgrown.

There were also these consumeristic stickers on the ground, playing up the few things there were to do locally.

If you keep walking, you’ll quickly reach the end of this development. Beyond it is a shopping center with a Home Depot, and not much of anything else you can or would particularly want to walk to.

On the other side of the station is a large residential development still partially under construction, consisting, as far as I could tell, entirely of townhomes. Design-wise, they’re typical, look nice enough, and are new. They’re not cheap—one very large townhome recently sold for over $1 million—but they’re cheaper than pretty much anything in Fairfax County, certainly new construction (I think the more average townhomes go for somewhere around $700,000.)

It was disappointing to see these massively overbuilt streets, especially in a development whose chief selling point is proximity to public transit.

Here’s the whole surrounding area:

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I suppose it’s natural that as you leave the urban core, the train acts less like a subway and more like a commuter train. But the suburbs are full of communities that could use rail, and where it might make sense (though perhaps some of them don’t want it). There are some places that scream for more transit, like the aforementioned One Loudoun mixed-use development, or older and more deeply settled parts of eastern Loudoun County around the area known as Dulles. Most of this is along Route 7, which is the older and more settled corridor in general.

How much sense does it make to run a very expensive rail system through what is mostly a wilderness of data centers, empty land, and suburban houses? Sure, this will fill in and get built out over time, in tandem with the rail extension. But should it have been encouraged to fill in, when we already have places which can grow and be connected to each other?

A 2018 pamphlet for the Loudoun Station development gives this description:

Loudoun County’s most anticipated, mixed-use, transit oriented development, Loudoun Station is quickly becoming the urban focal point of Loudoun County. The Loudoun Station neighborhood is already home to more than 700 residents and numerous businesses, retailers, restaurants, entertainment venues, and service providers. With new offerings and amenities constantly being added, Loudoun Station is quickly becoming one of the most dynamic communities in the entire Washington, DC region.

And One Loudoun calls itself “Loudoun County’s Downtown.”

From reading this, you wouldn’t know that Leesburg, a pretty decent-sized historic town, even exists. Nor do these newer town centers acknowledge each other. We aren’t really building places like this; we’re making products.

Now, I tend to think this sprawl will occur either way, and that it is better, on measure, to give current and future residents transit options than not to. But one person I know in this urbanism/transit/housing arena calls the Silver Line extension “rail sprawl”; of a piece with all the other sprawl, and not really superior to it. I take his point.

It also makes me think of Strong Towns’ critique of “transit-oriented development.” Here’s a long excerpt from an article over there on this topic:

Transit-oriented development (TOD) has been growing in popularity for many years, particularly in large metropolitan areas. With this development method, a rail line is built out to a less populated area, then large, mixed-use residences and businesses are constructed in close proximity to that rail stop. The idea is that now you have manufactured a dense neighborhood where people can live without needing a car and use the rail line to commute to work. 

Strong Towns is often assumed to be in favor of this style of development, since it has many of the features we discuss and advocate for like mixed-use buildings and compact, walkable neighborhoods. But this assumption is misguided.

We cannot manufacture productive places like a cargo cult, simply by adopting some of the characteristics of other productive places we’ve visited or heard about; we have to drill deep to uncover why those places were actually productive. It wasn’t just because they were walkable or built more compactly, it was because they developed over time, through trial and error, with resilient, bottom-up practices, rather than a top-down, megaproject, debt-based mentality. And those traditional development features are certainly not present in the transit-oriented development model, any more than they’re present in the manufactured “town squares” and “entertainment districts” popping up all over the place these days….

Instead of transit-oriented development, we should have development-oriented transit: Identify places where things are happening now and then connect them with the lowest level of viable transit possible. Make sure those places allow the next increment of development by right (without extensive permitting). This will ensure that the transit is viable and that it supports that next level of growth and expansion.

When that next level of growth and expansion happens, everything moves up a notch. Upgrade the transit to the next level—from jitney to shuttle bus, from shuttle bus to city bus, from city bus to streetcar, from streetcar to light rail, from light rail to subway—and repeat. 

That is how we built just about every great place in this country. And it’s almost alien to us today.

What do you think?

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Related Reading:

Northern Virginia Tour

A Little More on Rockville Pike

Towns of My County

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