The FasTracks I-225 Intra-Suburban Beltway Corridor

The issues surrounding the proposed Purple Line on the Washington D.C. subway system are very relevant for FasTracks. See below for an extended excerpt from an article titled "Greening the Suburbs" from The New Republic's environmental blog, The Vine.

The Purple Line in Maryland would be the first intra-suburban rail transit line in the D.C. system because it would not carry people from the suburbs to the city center in a hub-spoke model but instead would follow the beltway around the city carrying people between the suburbs. The purple line provides connectivity between the spoke lines near the perimeter of the system allowing for transfers to occur away from the city center.

In the FasTracks system, the analogous line is the I-225 Corridor which will connect the Southeast and East Corridors together and make it easier for Southeast riders to travel to DIA as well as serving new destinations in Aurora. This line is an intra-suburban beltway line like the purple line in D.C.

Some of the proposed solutions to the FasTracks budget deficit involve shortening the I-225 Corridor including not completing loop and terminating the line before the connection to the East Corridor at the Peoria/Smith Station. As I have said in previous posts, I believe any cuts to the FasTracks system including the I-225 line would be a huge mistake.

Excerpt from "Greening the Suburbs:"

"The logic undergirding the Purple Line is that D.C.'s Metro, like most old-school subways, is a hub-and-spoke model, built for an era when people lived in the suburbs and commuted downtown for work. Nowadays, though, most traffic flows from suburb to suburb—hence the need to interlink Montgomery County and Prince George's County. Most area residents favor some sort of connecting line; the bickering is over the details. Marc Elrich, a Montgomery County councilman, explained that he was agonizing about whether Maryland should spend $1.2 billion on a fixed light-rail system projected to transport 64,000 people per day, or spend just $600 million on a bus rapid transit (BRT) system with a dedicated lane, projected to transport 58,000, and use the savings for other worthwhile initiatives.

Chris Leinberger, a Brookings expert on development who comes at things from a real-estate perspective, countered that Elrich was approaching this too narrowly. Leinberger argued that transportation tends to drive development, and that transit projects should be viewed as a means of creating new value in a metro area. In that vein, he argued that middle-class people like trains well enough, but often refuse to ride buses, which carry the stigma of poverty; as a result, developers are much more likely to invest around rail stations than bus stops. (This may not be an ironclad law, but, alas, the United States has relatively few examples of successful BRT, a la the famous system in Curitiba, Brazil).

What's more, Leinberger assured the audience, developers will flutter to new light-rail stops in droves, because there's colossal pent-up demand in this country for transit-oriented development. By his count, some 30 to 50 percent of residents in U.S. metropolitan areas want to live in a walkable urban environment—a trend fueled by the growing number of single and childless couples, who will constitute 88 percent of household growth through 2040. Trouble is, he estimates there are currently only enough walkable neighborhoods to satisfy about 5 to 10 percent of metro residents, which is why rents in transit-accessible areas are so exorbitant. (Incidentally, the boom in childless households is one reason why development in D.C. could start to expand beyond Montgomery County and toward the northeastern suburbs, which have long been hampered by relatively inferior schools.)

Of course, to fix all this, new rail lines alone won't suffice. The towns around the proposed stops will have to revamp their zoning codes to allow high-density development near train stations—a suggestion that's typically greeted by angry, pitchfork-wielding mobs. (Ryan Avent recently dredged up a perfect example.) Now, since these changes in land use can both reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and bring down the cost of housing, Leinberger argued that environmentalists and social-justice activists should be at the forefront here. "Instead," he said, "you've just been leaving it up to developers—and no one seems to trust us!" Not that developers will ever be irrelevant: One interesting point Leinberger made was that if transit really does create the sort of value he expects, then real-estate developers should be more willing to pitch in and help finance these projects."