How Washington DC fixed their Metro’s biggest problem

[Music] I flew to Washington DC to make this video more specifically I flew into Washington Dallas airport so I could take the silver line and make a video about it and you might be thinking why should I care well let me tell you why back in 1962 when Dallas airport first opened it was left out of the initial plans for the DC Metro because this was in the middle of nowhere what most decision makers failed to realize was the sheer amount of growth that would later occur along the Dallas Corridor especially here in Tyson's Corner now a regional economic Powerhouse home to the headquarters of companies like Capital 1 not building the Metro out here forced the entire Corridor to grow up around the automobile creating severe traffic congestion and isolating Tyson from Washington DC a bit embarrassing for a supposed high-tech business district but when the silver line was finally complete connect ing DC with Tyson's and onto Dallas airport it not only demonstrated a willingness to recognize when mistakes have been made but the ability to actually fix them even when it took $3 billion and a decade of political Warfare the story of the silver line shows us how it's never too late to build better Transit and in this video we'll see how the DC Metro somehow pulled it off was left for dead it was brought back to life it was dead again [Music] it's before we get to how deep DC fix the Metro we need to First understand where it went wrong which is right at the beginning like many US cities in the' 60s Washington DC was looking to improve its Transportation unlike many cities they actually pushed back on a massive freeway proposal that would have put a highway right through where I'm standing instead the government created the Transit Agency that would later become wada and tasked them with developing a subway system so wada called the ncta at the time went and asked surrounding counties what routes they'd like to have in a Metro System some County leaders recognized that a metro line could be a once in a generation opportunity to help create dense walkable communities Montgomery County took full advantage of this asking for a metro line into a sleepy suburb called Bethesda while updating its zoning codes to allow for taller buildings near Transit stations 40 years on the area has gained a tidy reputation for being one of the more walkable and desirable areas around DC but some other counties weren't quite as Forward Thinking Fairfax County would see their population more than quadruple from 1950 to 1970 but there were no obvious hubs to build around so they focused instead on serving existing residential areas proposing that the Metro extend to the town of Vienna little attention was paid to the Dallas Corridor which at the time was just rural land leading to the airport and that was the first mistake not realizing that a new Subway didn't have to adhere to existing population patterns and that it could be used to reshape areas instead like what happened in Bethesda this oversight seemed to be caused by a disconnect between planners and politicians depending on who you want to blame but the end result was the same the Orange Line would run to Vienna not anywhere near the Dallas Corridor nobody knew for sure where the next growth Center outside of DC would be but there were some Clues while DC itself rejected the freeway construction was ripping ahead for the capital Beltway the widening of Route 123 and the transformation of Route 7 into a Lane Highway if you were creating a new business district outside of DC where would you choose it's not that hard Scott in the span of 20 short years Tyson's Corner went from a country Crossroads with an apple stand to a sprawling commercial complex with an Apple store by 2000 it was the 14th largest business district in the US and companies like Capital 1 set up their headquarters here while others like paler opened offices to serve the DC area but there was a dark side to all of this growth remember how the Metro ended at Vienna not extending it here forced the entire Corridor to become dependent on the automobile creating a lot of sprawl as the region grew rapidly by the '90s the entire Washington metropolitan area had the second worst traffic Nationwide because the Washington region is the most congested in the US everyone knew that something had to change and this is where our story goes from what went wrong to how do they fix it traffic was bad enough that Ron the missile manufacturer decided that they could do a better job in 1998 they put together an unsolicited proposal for a rail line and boss rapid transit system to serve the Dallas Corridor in an extremely rare case of an unsolicited document doing something good the Virginia Department of rail and public transportation then asked for competing proposals kickstarting the planning process that eventually culminated in the silver line but let's go back to the proposal after a few years of scoping it was decided that extending the metro into the corridor would be the best way to improve congestion winning out over several brt proposals the new silver line extension would be built in two phases phase one would split off from East Falls Church and go to Reston alleviating congestion around Tyson's and McLean sooner Phase 2 would be built around 6 years after that continuing onto Dallas airport and Beyond into Lowden County there was no single reason for why this was done in two phases but one reason was that it was easier to get Federal funding for a smaller project which brings us to this Channel's favorite topic funding fund funded funding Project funding when financing was being initially worked out in 2003 Fairfax County agreed to put in around $400 million for Phase 1 to raise this 400 million the county worked with land owners to create a special tax District called a transportation improvement district or tid the logic was that a Subway increases the value of surrounding real EST estate so it makes sense to ask those land owners who would benefit from the subway to help pay for its creation something like 20 cents per $100 of land value to actually Implement This Ti a petition had to be signed by land owners representing 51% of the land value within the corridor so in 2003 a group of land owners based in Tyson's called leader because you need an acronym for everything put together a petition and barely got that 51% the Virginia General Assembly approved the plan and all that was left was to get approval from the town councils whose land overlapped with the proposed tid area but let's pause here because do you see where it gets a bit unfair the silver line was being built in two phases with Phase 2 coming at least 6 years after Phase 1 but the proposed tid included all the land for both phases meaning that all land owners along the line would be taxed the same amount starting at the same time regardless of phase land owners near Phase 1 basically Tyson's would therefore get six extra years to benefit from the Silver Line compared to phase 2 landowners further west even though they all paid the same amount of money this 6 years could mean a lot especially in terms of appreciating land value with the Metro there was also no guarantee that Phase 2 would even be built because of a so-called poison pill clause in the petition if Phase 2 somehow slipped out of the next federal funding cycle in six years there would have to be another petition to reevaluate the feasibility of phase 2 which could theoretically be rejected it was therefore possible that the whole cardar be taxed phase one to be completed then land owners and Tyson to vote against completing Phase 2 which would leave western land owners having paid millions in taxes for a Subway that didn't even reach them now there wasn't any indication that this would actually happen but the risk was too great for these Phase 2 land owners further west especially near hearnden and because the T ID encompassed Heen their Town Council needed to approve the proposal in November 2003 which they rejected unanimously the tid was dead which meant that Fairfax County wouldn't have the $400 million they needed to contribute which blew up the local funding plans that needed to be secured by Spring 2004 in order to meet the once every 6 years Federal funding cycle missing this deadline would pretty much mean the end of the silver line it was very much on the edge of death [Music] except everyone knew that the dullas corridor still desperately needed a Subway so the counties still needed to find a way to get that 400 million what helped was that the phase 2 land owners didn't actually disprove of the silver line just the inequity of the proposed tid so Fairfax County the leader group and representatives from The Phase 2 landowners moved very quickly to create a new proposal this time involving two separate tids to match the schedule and geography of the Project's two phases amazingly this was somehow all done in a matter of months just in time to meet the spring 2004 deadline to apply for federal funding but just when you thought it got better it gets a bit worse first there would now be 6 years until the phase 2 tid needed to be finalized ahead of the next federal funding cycle have you ever had something that was due in 6 years when would you actually start working on it unsurprisingly the lack of urgency made it pretty difficult to recapture the support and energy necessary to create that second tid and to make things more difficult in the time since that first tiid was miraculously rushed through in 2004 a lot of the stakeholders regarding the Silver Line had changed the federal and state governments were walking back their prior commitments to phase 2 and the landowners themselves changed as property was bought and sold the group of phase 2 land owners driving the initiative forward now called Ward had the unenviable task of slowly rounding up the necessary support for another petition to create the second tid a grueling process that took 5 and 1 half years but after a few missed deadlines the second tid was finally approved in 2009 Phase 2 of the silver line would be built I'm highlighting these funding challenges because it would have been so easy to just let the project die when hearen rejected the original tid there was no clear path forward and a very tight deadline to try and find a solution in the years after that that when the Bush Administration pulled funding for Phase 2 it would have been so easy to declare the project financially unviable and give up on an airport connection but at every challenge there was a very real sense of we still want to build this so how can we make it work we shouldn't shy away from this messiness when delivering large capital projects because that's how we get solutions that actually work for everyone this amount of collaboration is definitely something to take note of and it's something that's honestly quite rare but it's the only way that the Silver Line could have survived at this point I'm going to gloss over some of the other challenges the Silver Line faced otherwise this video would be an hour long most of the silver line runs on elevated track but from 2005 to 2008 there was a very long and very expensive fight to try and move the line underground At Tyson's everyone recognized that a tunnel would probably be more desirable than the elevated option both from a usability and aesthetic perspective since you wouldn't be sticking 30t High call of concrete everywhere but the tunnel would be far more expensive and the project was already over budget by around a billion dollars by mid 2005 still a tunnel was just so much more appealing and the contractor group was asked to prepare a cost estimate for a tunnel option the contractors came back with a report saying that a tunnel would definitely not be cheaper and it would add $500 million to the total budget the contractors also said that the non- tunnel option would now cost an extra 200 million because this whole tunnel debate was taken so damn long long the next few years saw more Shenanigans involving the governor of Virginia and separately a lawsuit against the Department of Transportation Al while the budget was growing uncomfortably quickly and giving the federal government a convenient excuse to pull their own funding some lawmakers recall that the Bush Administration made it clear that a tunnel would mean reapplying for federal funding a 15-year process with no guarantee of success as The Silver Line found itself on the verge of death yet again the tunnel was finally dropped in favor of the elevated track in 2018 cracks were discovered in the walls of five unopened Phase 2 stations subsequent investigation and a report from a whistleblower from several years prior revealed that the contractor had falsified quality control reports and delivered an aggregate different from the contracted one this Saga contributed to the delay of phase 2 completion and a full shutdown of the silver line during the early days of covid in order to allow for round thee clock maintenance while never an existential threat to the Silver Line Co added to the almost comical number of delays to opening Phase 2 low ridership supply chain issues and a budget squeeze from Co meant that when it was all said and done Phase 2 finally opened in November 2022 completing a silver line that had been decades in the making this project I can remember was left for dead it was brought back to life it was dead again it's brought back to the whole project took $5.6 billion 50 7% more than initial estimates and probably infinitely more if they just put it in the original route network but I'm sitting on the silver line right now it means that I don't have to sit in traffic to get from Dallas airport to the city center and the same goes for anyone who lives or works in the corridor I think the biggest takeaway from the story is that it is never too late to build better Transit and now and now the silver line is something that Washington DC can be very proud of thanks for watching that wall is Absolut if you watch my last video about how Duke killed an LRT then you know that I'm trying to make more videos about the lessons from Lost transit systems I got a bit sidetracked and made this video about a success story instead but now I think I'll roll with both if you have any suggestions for either lost transit systems or success stories that we can learn from or honestly any cool story from any transit system leave a comment below I'll definitely try and get to it [Music] o

Channel: The Flying Moose

Views: 260,231

Keywords: Silver line, Dc subway, Sliver line, Washington metro, Dulles airport metro, Tysons corner, Tysons subway, Tysons metro, Washington DC metro

Id: FdByhKpEKfU

Length: 14min 43sec (883 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 07 2024