Norfolk’s 7.4 mile light rail starter line, The Tide, is currently under construction and due to open in 2011, and already Virginia Beach is looking to extend it. At the same time the Commonwealth of Virginia is studying increased passenger rail from Richmond to Hampton Roads, and just today President Obama awarded federal funds for high speed rail improvements south from DC.

With increased passenger rail such a hot topic in Tidewater Virginia, it seems a good time to consider what the future of rail transit there might look like. Assuming light rail is a success, as it is virtually everywhere it’s built, where might it go next? That Virginia Beach extension is the obvious next direction, but it’s far from the only option.

BeyondDC has extremely limited personal experience in Hampton Roads, but with satellite imagery from Google Maps available to anyone with a computer, it’s easy enough to get a pretty good sense of land use and density. Using that information it’s possible to make reasonably accurate assumptions about where transit might work best. Of course Google Maps is no substitute for real on-the-ground experience, but at the very least it’s enough to start a discussion. So here goes.

What a larger light rail system in Hampton Roads might look like:

Diagrammatic map.
Click to enlarge.

Geographic map, for context.
The red line is light rail currently under construction.
The orange lines are potential extensions.
Click to see it in Google Maps.

In total there are about 48.5 miles of light rail on these maps; 7.4 miles of under-construction-starter-line, plus a little over 41 miles of new proposal. The existing starter line is costing $288 million, or $39 million per mile. At that same per mile cost it would be another $1.6 billion to complete the entire system. That’s comparable to the cost of the DC streetcar system, for a much larger population. Obviously it is much less than the $5.1 billion Metrorail Silver Line.

Obviously there’s some weird stuff going on here. Those trips from downtown Portsmouth or Virginia Beach’s oceanfront to downtown Norfolk would take such a long time that I can’t imagine very many people would be interested in making them via rail. Nonetheless, those lines could be good corridors if you think of them as primarily serving downtown Portsmouth and the oceanfront, with the connections to the larger system merely a bonus. Hampton Roads is such a polycentric region that the normal of rail may not apply.

One last thing. There are probably critics who suggest that the Hampton Roads region is too small for such an ambitious system. That claim would ignore the experience of other mid-sized American metropoli, most particularly Salt Lake City, which is smaller and more suburban than Hampton Roads by just about every metric, yet has a successful system of 20 miles of light rail and 44 miles of commuter rail already in operation, with significant expansions to both planned.

So, what do folks think?