We wonder how many residents of the Providence Magisterial District in central Fairfax County have any idea how much worse traffic is going to get for them as a result of massive, transit-oriented development approved by the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors in Tysons Corner, Merrifield and the MetroWest area near Vienna.
Charlie Hall does. During a primary debate Wednesday night with incumbent Supervisor Linda Q. Smyth, challenger Hall correctly labeled traffic as the county’s worst problem, calling the elevated Dulles rail project a “disaster” that “could destroy Tysons forever.” Blasting the current board for approving too much new development without having in hand funds for needed infrastructure improvements, Hall told fellow Democrats that while he didn’t expect county officials to fix the area’s legendary traffic congestion, “we do expect our supervisors not to make things worse.”
If “do no harm” is now the standard low expectation of elected public officials, the Fairfax supervisors have failed miserably. The county’s already inadequate road system simply cannot handle more vehicles. But besides left-turn lanes on Route 7, there’s no new state-funded road projects in Fairfax County on the Commonwealth Transportation Board’s Six Year Plan. As the Northern Virginia Transportation Alliance pointed out, after transit gets its cut, just $120 million of the $436 million raised mostly from drivers in Northern Virginia under the recently passed transportation bill will be available for new regional road projects. Even that meager amount has to be divided among nine jurisdictions, so transit gets the money, drivers get the shaft.
Transit-oriented development encourages higher density near transit stations. In theory, it’s a great way to manage growth. In the real world, however, the concept has been used to justify tripled densities in Tysons Corner based on the ridiculous assumption that thousands of new homes and businesses won’t put more vehicles on the county’s clogged roads or overwhelm the already overcrowded Orange Line. Incumbent supervisors like Smyth should explain why they make policy on such obviously fallacious reasoning.
Like all living things, communities must either keep growing or start to die. But the goal should be healthy, organic growth that balances the needs of existing neighborhoods with new business opportunities that enhance residents’ quality of life. Unfortunately, that ideal is just the opposite of the supervisor-sanctioned, too-rapid overdevelopment now overtaking Providence District like a metastasizing cancer.
