Posted Jul 9, 2014, 1:39 AM
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Registered User
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Join Date: Aug 2002
Location: Toronto
Posts: 52,200
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The suburb of the future is here
Read More: http://www.salon.com/2014/07/06/the_...uture_is_here/'
Quote:
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Just across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., home to the Pentagon and National Airport, Arlington has grown rapidly over the past half-century. Like many inner-ring suburbs, its population exploded between 1940 and 1960, from 57,000 to 163,000. But then, after a period of decline in the 1970s, it grew again, from 153,000 in 1980 to 227,000 today.
- That second spurt of growth did not look much like the first: The new Arlington reached for the sky, with clusters of high-rise buildings that today give the county a more impressive skyline than the squat panorama of the capital. What’s more, population numbers don’t tell half the story. Office space in America’s fourth-smallest county has expanded from about 6 million square feet in 1960 to about 40 million today — making it a greater employment center than downtown Dallas or downtown Denver.
- And here’s the really remarkable thing: Despite the influx of tens of thousands of workers and residents, despite the transformation of this sleepy suburb into a mid-size city, traffic has thinned. Nearly 20,000 cars traveled along Wilson Boulevard, a major east-west route here, each day in 1980. Today, that number is down to 13,000. Other arterials have shown similar declines: On the six-lane Jefferson Davis Highway (yes, Virginia has one of those), traffic dropped by 15 percent between 1996 and 2011/12. During that same period, the Lee Highway and Washington Boulevard also recorded 15 percent reductions in traffic.
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