From the Washington Post comes word that Arlington and Faifax are on their way towards teaming up to build a 4.7-mile, $120 million streetcar line from Pentagon City to Skyline. This is a great idea, whose time has certainly come both in terms of technology as well as $3 per gallon gas prices. Overall, according to the Post, the Arlington-Fairfax trolley line is "setting the stage for suburban Washington's first use of a transportation system undergoing a national renaissance." And that's a great thing.
Can this work here? In Portland, Oregon, which has been studied extensively for this system (an which I have personally had the pleasure of riding - it's great!), the "five-year-old streetcar line...averages about 9,000 weekday riders and has attracted more than $2 billion of commercial development near its track since 1997." Sounds good to me. Another model is Arlington County itself, and specifically the Rosslyn-Balltson corridor, "a nationally recognized model of transit-oriented development with five Orange Line stations."
With all the talk about transportaion gridlock in Virginia these days, here in Arlington - and now Fairfax, - we are moving ahead rapidly to solve it through transit-oriented, high density "smart growth" - not the unsustainable, decentralized "sprawl" model that has caused so many problems in "Suburban Nation" (great book, by the way, which I strongly recommend!).
Anyway, I strongly hope that this streetcar system gets built as quickly as possible. To paraphrase Tennessee Williams, this is a streetcar to be (greatly) desired. Stella!
And BTW: Mr. Zimmerman, there is nothing wrong with Columbia Pike, it needs to be revitalized like George Allen needs to be re-elected!
NO TROLLY, NO TROLLY, NO TROLLY!
Also, why do you say there's "nothing wrong with Columbia Pike?" I think most Arlingtonians agree it needs help.
...New commercial construction on Columbia Pike in the 1970s and 1980s consisted primarily of fast food restaurants, convenience stores and drive-through
banking facilities. These facilities are all free-standing buildings surrounded by parking, which further fragmented Columbia Pike’s compact, urban character and contributed
to its transformation into a strip commercial area. Today the image of Columbia Pike is that of an older, neglected, auto-oriented, suburban commercial strip with a random assortment of retail, office and residential uses.
In other words, Columbia Pike needs revitalization badly, and Arlington County is pushing hard to make it happen.
When the Metro system was first built, transit planners did envision a line out to Dulles (going so far as to draw a dotted line on their planning maps) and a line along Columbia Pike, and tail tracks extend from the Pentagon for a short bit in expectation. Heavy rail, however, is prohibitively expensive.
Extending Metrorail down to Columbia Pike also brings in the awkward question of where those trains will go. Metro barely has the cars to cover the system as it is, and more to the point, there is no capacity on the system to send the trains anywhere without removing service somewhere else. To be able to maintain the same amount of service on the Blue and Yellow lines if a new Metro line is built to the Pentagon, the Pentagon station would have to be rebuilt and some areas quadruple-tracked. Not going to happen. Someone will lose service if a new Metro line comes on.
Cities across the nation are flocking to light rail systems because they provide service to bus-wary crowds at cheaper cost. Light-rail systems are, however, much slower than heavy rail systems, but with Metro subsisting on funding table scraps the impetus for a multi-billion dollar heavy rail extension along Columbia Pike is not going to happen.
Metro is currently building a test line along an abandoned rail line in Anacostia which is expected to come online later this year.
In upstate New York at the turn of the last century we had light rail/trolleys running from town to town past cows in their pastures. But along came the automobile and the big oil companies that wanted no competition from trolleys so they could sell more gasoline. Yeah, as long ago as that we danced to the tune of Standard Oil.