The Great Society Subway by Zachary M. Schrag
Author:Zachary M. Schrag
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: History
Publisher: JHUP
Published: 2008-04-02T04:00:00+00:00
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8 The District
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From the first discussions of bringing rapid transit to Washington, advocates of rail knew that they would have to make the case that transit could shape land use in the metropolitan region. In the 1950s jobs and people were rapidly moving from central Washington to the suburbs. If this trend continued, the people of the region would soon be scattered so sparsely that no transit system could hope to gather enough of them to fill a bus or rail car. In contrast, if transit planners and local governments could find the right mix of incentives and sanctions, they could steer development into dense clusters around transit stations. People living, working, or shopping in such clusters would find transit a convenient alternative to driving. Only by attracting dense commercial and residential development to its stations could Metro’s planners achieve significant ridership and constrain automobile-oriented sprawl.1
Thirty years after ground breaking, it is still early to judge their efforts. Just as it took the capital a century and a half to fill in all the avenues laid out by L’Enfant, so it may take several decades for the region to add flesh to the Metro skeleton. But one thing is clear: it will not just happen. In 1988 Juri Pill of the Toronto Transit Commission explained that visitors to his city often expressed “a fervent desire to get back home and start a-building transit lines so that new buildings will start poppin’ outa the ground like toadstools. It ain’t that simple, folks.”2 Nor was it simple in Washington. From the early 1970s through the present, planners have labored to determine both their goals for Metro and the best means to them.
Theoretically, since 1966 regional planning has been the responsibility of the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments (COG), the descendant of Robert McLaughlin’s regional club of the 1950s. In practice, COG gathers data, distributes federal funds, and provides a forum for intergovernmental discussions, but it has done little to constrain its member jurisdictions’ land use plans. Thus, key decisions on Metro were left to individual cities and counties.3
Some local policies helped produce bustling, mixed-use clusters. Others produced dense, wealthy neighborhoods and business districts while sacrificing diversity of uses and people. Elsewhere, Metro stations are surrounded by nothing but parking lots and vacant land. These mixed results prove Pill’s point: transit-oriented development is not a wild toadstool. It is a human cultivar, demanding care, foresight, and political will. In 1971 one planner noted that “it is within our collective power to make the massive fall-out from Metro benign or malignant. All we need to cure or prevent a basketful of current or impending ills is guts, honesty, cooperation, innovation, energy, and good sense. And all we need to convert a technical masterpiece into a social disaster is apathy.” Over the next three decades, officials would display every quality.4
Metro has eighty-six stations, each with its own story of station-area development. To suggest the complexity of those stories, this chapter and
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