As reported today in The Washington Examiner, the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors has granted approval for a complete make-over of Tysons Corner. With the imminent arrival of Metro service and traffic slowing to a glacial pace on Route 7, it’s obvious that something needs to be done. However, the plan adopted by county leaders on Tuesday seems hastily conceived and will not sufficiently address traffic congestion.
The transportation problem is obvious, but the plan is a grab bag of urban design buzzwords and environmental lip-service which buries the real essence of what is at stake. Underlying the plan is an assumption that the majority of people who work, shop, and live in Tysons will use mass transit to get there while at the same time choking out visitors and workers from the rest of Fairfax County.
Although the plan envisions a dense network of gridded streets to facilitate movement within Tysons, Routes 7 and 123 are still going to be major bottlenecks for people entering and leaving the area. Worse still, the plan envisions additional exit ramps on the Dulles Toll Road which will inevitably spread the gridlock of downtown Tysons onto the only reasonable bypass around the area.
The cost of transportation improvements within Tysons is estimated at $800 million, but we should anticipate that the project will ultimately cost at least double that. As an example, the Dulles Metro extension was originally projected to cost $1.52 billion, but that cost has now risen to at least $2.7 billion, and that’s only for the first phase out to Wiehle Avenue.
If you live in Burke or Mason Neck or Dranesville, the Board of Supervisors is more than happy to raise your taxes to pay for urbanizing Tysons, but what will you get out of it? Instead of spending untold millions on green spaces and eminent domain lawsuits to build the grid, the plan needs to focus first on routing traffic around and through Tysons for the rest of us who live and work in Fairfax County—and who will be paying the bill.
