Special Features

Image Libraries

Blog
Make no small plans – a radical concept for Route 50

GGW has a post up making the case for Arlington’s Lee Highway corridor as the next Columbia Pike. GGW suggests the corridor could be transformed from a series of strip malls into a genuine urban boulevard, with a string-of-pearls of walkable neighborhood centers, connected by a streetcar.

It’s a great vision, and someday it will happen. It’s such a natural low-hanging fruit type of corridor that such redevelopment is probably inevitable. Arlington’s long range transit plan already identifies Lee Highway and Glebe Road as the most important transit corridors in the county without existing or planned rail service. In another decade or so, when the Columbia Pike and Potomac Yards transitways are finished, the county will probably turn its attention to Lee Highway.

But what about after that?

It’s long been assumed that the Route 50 corridor is hopeless. It’s too oriented for high-speed auto traffic and has no potential walkable nodes. It’s a car sewer, for better or worse.

But is it really? Living in nearby Ballston, we’ve often wondered what could be done with Route 50 if the possibility for radical change ever made it onto the table. If it were politically feasible to convert 50 from a highway into a surface street and use some of its width for a transit line, could neighborhoods be built around it? Could 50 become the new Wilson Boulevard?

BeyondDC sat down at our computer and came up with the following plan. Pink is the Route 50 corridor, along with adjacent land that could be suitable for redevelopment. The green dots are potential transit stations.

click to enlarge
A possible Route 50 redevelopment plan for Arlington. Click to enlarge.

Surprisingly, there does seem to be room for a series of mixed-use, walkable neighborhoods along the corridor, in spaces that would leave the adjacent low-density neighborhoods in tact. It would be extremely difficult, of course. Not only would the roadway itself require an absolutely massive overhaul, but the Federal government would have to open up Fort Myer and Arlington Hall to development, which is unlikely to say the least.

So if it’s not exactly realistic to expect an urban Route 50 any time in the immediate future, it does at least seem physically possible. Maybe, when Columbia Pike and Lee Highway have met their potential, Route 50 can get some love.

We can only hope.

click to enlarge
The route could be extended west, where the City of Fairfax is already talking about beefed-up transit and walkable nodes. Click the map to enlarge.

Update 12/31: To clarify, this isn’t anything that could be seriously proposed any time soon. It wouldn’t be appropriate (or feasible) for a “real” plan to suggest such drastic redevelopment on any near term time scale. The constraints are unreasonable to try to tackle while Columbia Pike and Lee Highway are still hanging out there. The point of this exercise isn’t so much to ask “should we do this now” as it is to ask “could we do this if we wanted to”. In 2008 there is no question: We don’t want to. But in 40 years when Route 29 and the Pike are nearing build-out in the manner that Rosslyn-Ballston is now, and when gas prices have had another couple of decades to creep up, it could be a place like Route 50 becomes obsolete and needs a plan like this.

December 30th, 2008 | Permalink
Tags: featured post, master planning, transportation



Media

   
   



Site
About BeyondDC
Archive 2003-06
Contact

Search:

GoogleBeyondDC
Category Tags:

Partners
 
  Greater Greater Washington
 
  Washington Post All Opinions Are Local Blog
 
  Denver Urbanism
 
  Streetsblog Network



BeyondDC v. 2013d | Email | Archive of posts from 2003-2006