Now that the long-awaited Intercounty Connector is finally going to be built, there’s no time to waste moving to action on other much-needed transportation improvements for the Washington region. That means some sort of Purple Line, but not the versions currently proposed by the two candidates who are hoping to succeed Montgomery County Executive Doug Duncan.
Last month, the Montgomery County Council voted to spend $5 million to update the Bethesda Metro stop in anticipation of the project. But this was somewhat premature, as there’s still no consensus on what form a Purple Line linking Bethesda, Silver Spring and New Carrollton should take. The option that should be at the top of the list is a bus rapid transit system connecting these existing Metro stations. While the cost of a 14-mile rail extension is estimated at $2 billion, BRT could move just as many people the same distance at a tenth of the price and be in place to do it much sooner.
Yet neither current Council member Steven Silverman, D-at large, nor former Council Member Isiah Leggett is mentioning that fact. Silverman supports aboveground rail; Leggett wants the tracks underground to avoid disturbing residential neighborhoods. Neither is advocating the much more practical and adaptable BRT, which could and should be routed away from the beloved Capital Crescent Trail instead of right next to it.
The original Metro system was designed decades ago to transport commuters who were then mostly federal employees into the central city. Demographic changes, especially large population and job creation surges in the suburbs surrounding Washington, have made this model obsolete, which accounts for the fact that only 9 percent of all regional commuters take Metro to work every day. The lack of suburb-to-suburb access makes that particularly difficult if your job doesn’t happen to be in D.C. or near an existing Metro stop.
Connecting Metro’s far-flung spokes with an express BRT system would allow such inter-suburb travel at a fraction of the time it now takes, maximizing Metro’s capacity and getting more automobiles off the region’s already clogged highways. In fact, extending the Purple Line all the way around Metro and into Virginia on the new Woodrow Wilson Bridge spans, which were designed with precisely that eventuality in mind, should be one of the top transportation priorities of every public official in both Maryland and Virginia.
The reason the Purple Line is not already a reality is not so much a lack of money as it is a dearth of political leadership. Such leadership is needed even more now than ever to champion this obvious and commonsense approach to helping ease the Washington region’s worsening traffic congestion.
