Quote:
Originally Posted by rs913
One thing I sensed while going through your pictures was a very palpable tension between people who want the Orange Line corridor to be like NYC, and those who want it it to be like Reston, only with taller buildings.
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Precisely. This is what holds the entire DC region back. Too many people fail to realize that we are a huge metropolitan area with over 4.5 million (over 1 million of which live in Fairfax County, the region's largest jurisdiction) in the urban area, 5.8 in the metropolitan area. and this assumption that increased development and density leads to traffic. Traffic is the main sticking point in the area: it is so awful, yet nothing has been done until fairly recently, and for a number of years we had the worst traffic in the country. It wasn't until Arlington took note of the fact that automobile traffic has gone down even when the population tripled in the Orange Line corridor that people are tepidly now accepting higher density development, coupled with improved transit as a good thing. Keep in mind people here are not used to tall buildings, DC does have a very low height limit (we're not getting into it here, but for the record I'm not a fan).
As for Virginia politics.
