Photo by corey_blanksky.

Last year, a group of residents, business leaders, and landowners formulated a bold vision for Tysons: transforming the nation’s quintessential “edge city” from a sprawling mess of traffic-choked expressways and isolated office towers and malls into a walkable city. It’s getting four Metro stops, more than most cities have, and a Metro line linking it to an even larger city. If there’s any hope for suburban commercial centers to morph into something better, this vision was it.

Today, the Washington Post reported that Fairfax County planners have decided to scrap the idea. Of course, they’re not saying they’re scrapping it; instead, they’re just scaling it back. They want one-third less density, because they fear that the road infrastructure can’t handle the traffic 40 years from now. They also want to require massive new road infrastructure before most development can proceed: three interchanges on the Dulles Toll Road, another lane on the Beltway on top of the HOT lanes Virginia is already adding, and widened roads around the area.

That completely misses the point. Tysons’ wide expressways, Routes 123 and 7, already hamper the potential for walkability, and the cloverleaf interchanges where they meet and where 123 meets the Beltway represent voids that the task force had to painstakingly plan around. More auto infrastructure will only push the district in the wrong direction. Wider roads and more lanes will move buildings farther apart, causing fewer to walk or bike, requiring more parking and more lanes to get people there, moving buildings even farther apart.

But what about the traffic? Tysons isn’t like downtown DC, Rob Jackson of the McLean Citizens’ Association told the Post. Of course, downtown DC wasn’t like downtown DC 100 years ago. It wasn’t even like downtown DC 40 years ago, before the Metro; then, it had wider roads and many more parking lots. This constant “we’re not like [other place]” refrain we hear from anti neighbors obscures an important point: those places had to become that way somehow.

Downtown DC manages pretty well with very few freeways and a very walkable layout. Tysons can too. Just look at Arlington, which turned itself from a declining, run-down inner suburb into a nationwide success story. Plus, they managed to build high densities along major corridors without tearing down single-family neighborhoods nearby. And they’ve done it without increasing traffic. Tysons could do the same, if Fairfax planners weren’t so afraid to take the plunge.

There isn’t much of a middle ground between city and suburb. That’s one reason it’s so hard to create new cities in suburban areas. If you simply gradually increase density and gradually add transit, then there’s inevitably a long period where you have more density than the suburban model can handle but not enough for the urban one. Not enough people live in the area, and the transit isn’t sufficient to reduce traffic. If a large heavy rail system already runs through your town, as it did in Arlington after Metro’s construction, then the transit is already there to bootstrap the city across that chasm. That’s also true in Tysons, which is getting four Metro stations in anticipation of a city rising from its parking lots. Reducing density by a third and adding massive new auto infrastructure won’t turn this city into a little bit less of a city; it’ll just turn it into a failed “neverland,” to use Christopher Leinberger’s term.

If the Fairfax planning department gets their way, Planning Director Jim Zook will go down in history as the man who squandered the region’s biggest potential since Arlington in the 1970s. He’ll have taken a golden opportunity served up on a platter and turned it into lead.

David Alpert created Greater Greater Washington in 2008 and was its executive director until 2020. He formerly worked in tech and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco Bay, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He lives with his wife and two children in Dupont Circle.