For years, Tysons Corner has been primarily a commuter destination. With thousands of people pouring into the area each day for work, Tysons’ three main thoroughfares — Route 123, Route 7 and the Capital Beltway — are routinely plagued by severe traffic jams during morning rush hour, evening rush hour and even lunch hour.
“One of the issues in Tysons is it’s so auto-dependent that almost every trip involves a car, usually single-occupancy,” said Virginia Del. Jim Scott, D-Fairfax, interim chairman of the Tysons Land Use Task Force. “That causes a major traffic jam three times a day.”
But now that Metrorail looks like a reality for Tysons Corner and the rest of the Dulles Corridor, county officials are pinning their hopes on a host of development projects that will be centered around Tysons’ four planned Metro stations — slated for completion in 2011 — to alleviate the traffic andspur residential growth.
Much of the Dulles Corridor will be developed or redeveloped once Metro moves in, but Tysons has become the poster child for the future success of the Corridor with a grand plan to transform itself over the next 10 to 15 years from an employment center and shopping destination to a mixed-use, walkable community.
“The current idea of Tysons is a disjointed office center,” Scott said. “But it needs to be more livable in order to reduce traffic impact on the neighboring streets.”
The major development planned for Tysons will be a 75-acre mixed-use development by the Macerich Co., owner of Tysons Corner Center. The project will add about 1.4 million square feet of office space, 1,250 condominiums and apartments, a hotel and additional retail space on land surrounding the existing Tysons Corner Center.
The project will create a “family-friendly pedestrian-oriented environment that most people would say doesn’t exist in Tysons today,” said Tony Calibrese, of the law firm of Cooley Godward. Calibrese is the lead land-use lawyer for the Tysons Corner Center Project.
The new development — which is still going through rezoning approvals with the county — should go a long way to correct the “extraordinary imbalance of homes and jobs in the Tysons area,” Calibrese said. There are about 116,000 workers in Tysons and about 17,000 residents.
But Gerald L. Gordon, president and CEO of the Fairfax County Economic Development Authority, said Tysons will likely always be weighted toward business rather than residential.
“I don’t think it will balance out completely. You alleviate,” he said. “With the population growing, the business community also has to grow.”
Like much of the planned development in the Dulles Corridor, the reserved land for the project will actually be redeveloped. The first phase of the Tysons Corner project, scheduled to breakground in 2009, will be built just off Route 123 where a La Madeleine restaurant and a Circuit City currently sit. The second and third phases will be built over existing parking structures.
“The amount of vacant land at Tysons is minute,” said Sterling Wheeler, an urban planner with Fairfax County’s Department of Planning and Zoning. “But that isn’t related at all to how much Tysons can grow.”
Who’s picking up the Metro tab?
» The first phase of the Dulles Corridor Metrorail extension — or the first five stops up to Wiehle Avenue in Reston — is expected to cost $2.1 billion, according to figures from the Dulles Corridor Metrorail Project, a state agency. Funding for the project is coming from federal, state and local sources.
» Federal funding: 44 percent
» State funding: 28 percent
» Fairfax County: 28 percent
» A proposed 4-mile underground tunnel in Tysons could add anywhere from $200 million to $850 million to the total cost.