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Old Posted Jun 10, 2009, 7:13 PM
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Cirrus Cirrus is offline
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Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: Washington, DC
Posts: 18,344
It would be absolutely ridiculous to go to the expense and trouble of building Metro to such far-flung and low-density destinations. Not only would it be an outrageous and unnecessary expense, but it would seriously degrade the ability of the Metrorail system to serve the core of the region, considering the system core has such capacity problems already. In other words, we would be spending a whole lot of money to make the system worse.

I am all for rail to places like Centreville, but for goodness sake, match the rail mode to the needs of the corridor. For the same cost of one new Metro extension you could put light rail on every major corridor in Northern Virginia, or you could improve MARC and VRE so they ran at least hourly service all day long.

We in the DC region need to step outside the nonsense intellectual box we've put ourselves in that incorrectly says "Metrorail is the only good transit". Given the choice of throwing billions of dollars down the drain for something like a Metrorail extension to Centreville that would ultimately harm the system or spending that money on a whole network of improvements and lines using alternate modes serving dozens of destinations, it would be nothing short of insane to build the Metro.

I like Connolly and Moran. They are friends to urbanism and transit. But on this issue they are wrong wrong wrong. Metrorail extensions to distant suburbs is the worst possible way to spend the limited transit dollars that we have.
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