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You've mentioned this before and while I think this would be great for me personally as the station would be about 3-4 blocks from my house, there is no way to recapture the $120MM+ cost of this through significant increased intensification, unless you create an urban renewal district and forceable redevelop the property. (I know this area reasonably well as I ride through it every time I go to the Giant Supermarket at Riggs Road and Eastern Ave., just across the city-county line in PG. And the hill up Peabody, carrying groceries, is a b****.

There is a block wide industrial district along the tracks (it's on both sides on Chillum Place north of Kansas Ave.). Except for the old Baptist Home (I don't know who owns it now) at NH and Peabody, there are no large parcels to speak of that are capable of redevelopment. Some industrial parcels, sure, but they aren't that large, and there is some need to retain industrial land to service the city. Except for some garden apartment buildings, everything else is single family detached.

Metrics about build out opportunity have to be tied together to these kinds of proposals. Compare this proposal to NY Ave. or Alexandria's Potomac Yards... There is no comparison.

I can't think of a worse spending of $120MM (or more) on transit than this. Well, a bunch of Downtown Circulators deployed like the Capitol Hill one...

And note, for a variety of reasons I've come around to your separated yellow line proposal. Over long time frames, it can have great potential in terms of redevelopment and intensification and reduction of VMT/vehicular travel, but more importantly it is about redundancy and adding capacity.

by Richard Layman on Feb 24, 2010 6:49 pm • link • report