An elevated subway line in Queens, NY. Photo by Doug Craig.

During the design process for the Silver Line, now under construction, a group of citizen activists advocated putting the Tysons Corner portion in a tunnel rather than mostly elevated, as ultimately planned.

There was a vigorous debate about the merits of elevated rail as a planning tool for TOD versus a tunnel. Our existing walkable urban places with elevated Metro stations provide some clues to the intricacies and challenges related to retrofitting a suburban place.

In our region, we have no pure suburban-to-urban retrofits like in Rosslyn-Ballston centered on an elevated Metro station. We do have some walkable urban places that have elevated stations, but they are all legacy places. Regardless, during the 2000’s, the elevated Metro stations helped breathe new life into those legacy places.

The King Street and Silver Spring elevated Metro stations provide us with valuable ideas about the challenges related to an elevated rail station in a walkable urban place. Additionally, elevated heavy rail stations in other regions were the primary catalysts in developing new vibrant walkable urban places.

King Street

The King Street Metro station lies at the western edge of the Old Town Alexandria’s legacy street grid. There has been a lot of new construction there. It is at the western edge of Old Town because it shares the same legacy right-of-way as the CSX/Amtrak tracks. There hasn’t been as much new construction closer into the core of Old Town because of strong historical preservation mechanisms (a good idea, in this instance).

Old Town Alexandria didn’t suffer the same magnitude of decline as Silver Spring and downtown Rockville did during the second half of the 20th century. It was still a desirable place with a good social reputation. During the bubble years, it was hard to disentangle how much of the rapid appreciation of properties in Old Town were due to its desirability as a vibrant, safe, walkable urban place or Metro proximity.

King Street is a different case from the other two examples I’ll look at because it wasn’t built in a place that desperately needed a new infusion of vibrancy. There is little opportunity for TOD in walking distance to the west of the King Street Metro Station due to a lack of strip malls and difficult existing infrastructure. Perhaps the greatest potential for King Street Metro as a catalyst for dramatic TOD is as an end of a VA-7 rail line, as described by Steve Offutt.

Silver Spring

Silver Spring is a legacy streetcar suburb whose early 20th century urban form is largely intact. It was the end of the Georgia Avenue Streetcar that was dismantled in early 1961.

The right-of-way that the Red Line shares between Silver Spring and Union Station predates Silver Spring. Silver Spring did not have a station on the Metropolitan Branch when it was growing up.

The old Georgia Avenue streetcar had stations near Eastern Avenue and at its terminus at Colesville Road. Consequently, Silver Spring had two separate development centers in its infancy, one on each side of the railroad. Over time, they grew together as a coherent whole, despite the railroad acting as a barrier.

The Metropolitan Branch in Silver Spring

When the suburbanization era hit, Silver Spring declined fairly uniformly. During the 2000’s, Silver Spring revitalized very quickly and dramatically. The Ellsworth Avenue development worked as a Bright Shiny Object to bring people to Silver Spring to check it out. The Metro station in Silver Spring was the key as many new shoppers and restaurant-goers took transit to the legacy transit-oriented place.

However, the revitalization has not been as uniform on both sides of the railroad (now shared with the Red Line) as the decline was. Unlike in future Tysons, the Red Line right of way is at grade in Silver Spring, except for the elevated tracks that include the station itself.

While the residences and businesses to the west of the Metro station and along East-West Highway have obtained a higher profile in recent years, the businesses south of the railroad on Georgia Avenue have not. Quite simply, they are on the wrong side of the tracks and also up to a 15 minute walk from the Metro. For visitors from outside of Silver Spring, the walk feels longer than it actually is.

Regardless, the Metro was the unquestionably the key to Silver Spring’s dramatic revitalization. The southern part would be best addressed by replacing the infrastructure that it grew up around: a streetcar. Hopefully Montgomery County/Maryland will be able to extend the District’s Georgia Avenue streetcar in the future.

While Silver Spring clearly shows that an elevated rail station can used as a catalyst for revitalizing a legacy walkable urban place that didn’t grow up around the rail station, it doesn’t really answer the question about new development or redevelopment. For examples of elevated rail and new development, we need to look outside of our region since all of our elevated Metro stations are in legacy railroad rights of way.

Queens, NY

When we think of the New York City Subway, we often think of claustrophobic, low-ceilinged stations beneath the streets of Manhattan. However, the Subway is often elevated above a major boulevard in the boroughs. (The boroughs can be thought of as comparable to the neighborhoods that are north of Florida Avenue that were in Washington County before 1871; they were the earliest “suburbs,” though not to be confused with the car-dependent post-war suburbs.) The map below is of Queens Boulevard, a major urban boulevard in Queens, NY.

The number 7 line of the New York City Subway operates on this elevated line. Since the Silver Line is planned to run above VA-7 throughout much of Tysons, the arrangement is Queens would have much in common with the future Silver Line.

New York City, outside of Lower Manhattan, grew up around its subway, as we can see from this 1915 New York Times article. That was decades before we started building car-dependent places and calling them “suburbs.” However, good traditional, walkable urban planning principles are timeless.

While we have planning tools like zoning and parking minimums to hammer out, the fundamental condition where many people are enthusiastic about paying good money for proximate fixed rail transit access that’s connected to their work and play still holds true.

Conclusion

There was much vigorous debate about whether the Silver Line in Tysons Corner should be underground or elevated. In the end, Virginia was absolutely correct to plan for an elevated Silver Line in exchange for FTA funding. While a Tysons Tunnel would be ideal, our experience in Silver Spring and the boroughs of New York City show that vibrant, sustainable, transit-oriented walkable urbanism is very possible with an elevated rail line. I am a firm believer in not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

While it is obvious that an underground Orange Line was excellent for the Rosslyn-Ballston Corridor, it wouldn’t have been impossible to achieve similar results with an elevated line. The key was timing. When Rosslyn-Ballston was being planned and built, traditional walkable urban development was very much out of fashion and viewed as extremely risky by both banks and developers.

While we can’t know for sure, I believe the level of walkable urban vibrance we see today would have taken decades linger with an elevated line, However, the perceptions of the real estate market in the late 20th century would have caused the delay, not the infrastructure itself.

Our attitudes about building traditional, sustainable, walkable urban towns have come a long way since the 1970’s and ‘80s when Rosslyn-Ballston was in its infancy. Walkable urban places no longer have the stigma they once did in the later 20th century. Today, the money is the more important motivator, as would make sense in our regulated capitalist economic system. There are plenty of honest business opportunities that coincide with doing the right thing for both municipal budgets and the environment with TOD related to elevated rails.

It is very possible that our current period of austerity will last a number of years. Even so, we will still need new infrastructure that is appropriate for building and sustaining human-scale walkable urban places. Our environmental and fiscal challenges related to car-dependence will not change because of a sluggish economy.

As we look towards more fixed rail infrastructure, we should be very open to elevated rail. It will be much better than nothing. While a tunnel is clearly ideal, it is not the only solution that addresses our challenges. Sometimes the cost-effectiveness of elevated rails makes it the better choice in aggregate, especially when it’s that or nothing.