aquablue:
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Hey, I heard that the new Dulles rail link will be useless for DC due to time. How long will it take to get to Dulles from DC on the new metro link?
If it's over one hour, all I can say is --- idiotic shortsighted planning will come back to haunt you, my dear Washington Area.
I really hate this crap. How hard is it to put in some bypass tracks at stations so we could have express service like any proper civilized country?
So the Dulles rail line is going to be for Tysons and Reston basically? Pathetic. God, I really hate this sprawl-ville. DC is almost left out of the equation. Dulles is supposed to WASHINGTON's INTL. airport, remember? Not just Virginia's.
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Providing a connection from DC to Dulles is largely a secondary concern of the Silver Line. This is about the development of the Dulles corridor and the redevelopment of Tysons. I don't know if you have seen the Tysons thread under the City Compilations section but what is planned for Tysons is truly massive. It is the large redevelopment of an edge city in the country. When completed, it is expected to have a larger downtown than either Seattle or Houston:
http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post...hted-as-global-example-for-smart-growth/
Similarly, in the past two decades the job growth in the Dulles corridor and western Fairfax has also been significant. I read somewhere that Northern Virginia has more high tech jobs than the Silicon Valley. The Silver Line will serve this population. There are well over a million residents in Fairfax County and 300,000 - 400,000 in Loudoun County.
This will also encourage the continued development of Reston. Although a bit smaller scale, the Reston Town Center will be comparable to Bethesda or Silver Spring.
Another thing, with the connection to Dulles, is that because of the perimeter rule at Reagan, there are many international and transcontinental flights at Dulles. A one hour ground access time via the Silver Line is a smaller portion of the trip on a eight hour flight to Europe than it is on a regional flight to Akron. Admittedly, the 5A bus, with its dedicated lanes Dulles Toll Road, is still probably quicker.
I don't like sprawl-ville either but the DC region is really a poly-centric urban area with multiple dense walkable areas, including Reston and (in the future) Tysons.