Don’t Cut Tysons Corner in Two

[marmar]

via the Next American City blog:





This piece originally ran on Greater Greater Washington.


Virginia’s Fairfax County is planning to turn Tysons Corner, a commercial suburb just outside the District of Columbia, into a dense, walkable, urban center. This transformation will include the creation of street grid and better bike and pedestrian facilities. But two major thoroughfares will weaken pedestrian circulation and divide the new Tysons in two.

Route 123 and Route 7 are major six-lane roads running through the heart of Tysons Corner. The Silver Line, a planned extension of the D.C. Metro, will run along portions of either road, meaning that many pedestrians will be entering Tysons along these arteries.

But the construction of the Silver Line through Tysons Corner isn’t the only work being done in the corridor. Fairfax County is currently widening Route 123 from six to eight lanes.

The creation of a grid of streets coupled with bike/pedestrian improvements is necessary to facilitate movement within an urban Tysons, particularly to and from the Metro stations. The widening of 123, however, moves Tysons Corner in the opposite direction. ..............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://americancity.org/buzz/entry/3299/

[leveymg]

1. Tysons Corner sprawl (CIA satellite city) is a traffic nightmare for the whole region.

Tysons distills all that's gone wrong with Northern Virginia (and America) since the Reagan years, as privatization and bloating of military/intel sector installations and contractors have gobbled up real estate, increasingly spread into the outer suburbs, and drive the growth of the federal budget. It's unliveable and unsustainable.

And, since the real estate is so valuable in CIA sat city, they demand that the rest of us pay an extra billion dollars to put the Silver Line underground so the developers can build more corporate towers.

[izquierdista]

2. There is a simple (if Soviet) solution

Didn't the CIA learn anything from decades of spying? Maybe they should be called the 'Central Stupidity Agency' instead. There is no problem at all in Eastern Europe reconciling pedestrian circulation and motor vehicle traffic. They have elevated the pedestrian underpass (less often an overpass) to a fine art. They even have capitalist businesses thriving below while the traffic goes on above.

Perhaps the planners there have what Mr. Spock described as "limited three-dimensional thinking".