Northern Virginia needs more transit, but it doesn’t need half a dozen more of these.

I like recently elected Congressman Gerry Connolly (D-VA). He understands the connection between transportation and land use and knows we can’t road-build our way out of congestion. He was fabulous as a Fairfax County Supervisor and I fully expect him to be fabulous as a Congressman.

But with all due respect to Mr. Connolly, he’s wrong about extending the Orange line from Vienna to Gainesville. We should absolutely have more transit in Northern Virginia, and in the DC-Fairfax-Manassas corridor specifically, but extending Metro along the median of I-66 would not be a good way to accomplish that.

Metrorail is the highest-capacity and most expensive kind of rail infrastructure available (short of mag-lev). This means governments should build Metrorail in places where that extremely high level of service is necessary. The sort of places that need such high level of service are urban downtowns, very dense inner city neighborhoods, and places where planners hope to create a downtown or a dense neighborhood. The median of an Interstate highway is none of those things, nor are far-out low density suburbs like Gainesville.

Now y’know, more transit is always good, so building a higher level than is necessary is OK (even desirable), except that we’re dealing with finite resources. Obviously if it were financially possible it would be ideal to have a 10, 000 mile-extensive mag-lev subway system operating under every major street in the region. Alas, since we have limited dollars, that isn’t possible.

Limited dollars are also why we shouldn’t be building Metrorail in a highway median to a low-density destination that will probably soon be served by other rail transit anyway. What should we do instead? How about THIS.

Instead of throwing billions of dollars into a single Metro line serving a single corridor that doesn’t need such high level of service to begin with, we should spend the same amount of money (or more, but either way) on improving regional rail and carpeting the whole region with streetcars/light rail. We could have this, which would be great but which we don’t really need, or we could have all this. For the same cost as it would take to extend the Orange line to Gainesville, we could extend VRE to Gainesville and drastically improve service frequencies on the entire VRE system and build a regional network of streetcars on several corridors around Northern Virginia.

Metrorail has been a glorious success and is worth every penny our region spends on it, but Washington area leaders need to understand that as magnificent as Metrorail is, it’s not the answer to every transit question that comes up. By matching the most appropriate transit mode to each corridor, we can spend our money more effectively and provide a higher level of transit service to a larger portion of our population covering a wider range of communities.