Takes to fucking long Wrote:
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> The problem with the silver line is it takes to
> fucking long, too many stops. Put in some express
> trains, until then fuck that I'll take an uber
> when I'm too drunk to drive.
They routed the Silver Line through Tysons with support of large business and large land owners there. It barely qualified for federal funding on its $3 billion price tag for just the Falls Church-Reston segment when built based on projected ridership. Weekday daily ridership in 2015 downloaded from
https://planitmetro.com/ was around 20K, much from Wiehle, probably some less now with the Metrorail reliability issues.
Building the Silver Line was a combination of errors of poor Metrorail design:
1. It should have had built straight on the Dulles Toll Road, with a segment offshoot to McLean (with trains only stopping peak times) and Tysons Corner Mall 1&2, one of three largest mall complexes on East Coast and the most used station in Tysons.
2. A connection made at/near West Falls Church. For any who do it, Tysons to Vienna requires a transfer at EAST Falls Church between Orange and Silver adding at least 10 minutes depending on transfer time. The tracks connect about a thousand feet past WFC, so a walkway and an interim stop on the Silver Line to existing WFC platform.
3. Additional track capacity to handle Blue, Orange, Silver, and say a Silver Tysons segment offshoot. Right now, only about 20-25 trains per hour get through Rosslyn-Foggy Bottom tunnel (actually 26 can be had spacing trains 140 seconds apart, but to some extent does not happen). Even with three lines, if all lines have equal service (come July 2017 WMATA budget), then trains only every eight minutes rush hour instead of every six 'scheduled' now. Perhaps the Tysons offshoot could only run to Ballston.
4. Not part of design, with existing tracks and no additional build, only keep the Tysons Corner station open during off-peak hours, and even also during rush hours, close down Greensboro which sees little usage even then. This was suggested early on in this or last years budget talks as a cost savings measure, but dropped when other stations in DC and MD they were planning to do likewise was going to disproportionately affect minority riders.
As far as cost, item 2 is the least cost to implement within an infill station and a walkway (couple of others have happened such as New York Avenue in DC and being considered Potomac Yards in Alexandria), item 1 down the toll road can happen probably under $1 billion, but cannot see it how it can happen without shutting the Silver line down off-peak hours to make the interconnections cutting through above ground concrete barriers. Item 3 discussed at Greater Greater Washington website
https://ggwash.org/ will cost billions, perhaps additional tracks through Georgetown including the bars there, but with funding challenges, likely do see that happening for a couple of decades. Item 4 actually saves Metro money, probably only in the millions of dollars, in station operation costs including paying the station managers.