No Silver Lining: Metro Growth Will Make Life Worse Before It Makes Life Better, Washington City Paper, Sept18, 2013

Kytja Weir writes an overview of the short-term minuses and the possible long-term pluses of the Silver Line in this excellent article.  Here' an extract:

. . . the Silver Line, heralded as it is, may actually make Metro worse for riders in the short-term.

Yes, the first 11.6-mile section will finally make the bustling, car-centric Tysons Corner hub of retail and jobs accessible by train. The rest of the 23-mile line should connect to Washington Dulles International Airport and Loudoun County by 2018. In doing so, the project will expand the Metrorail system by 22 percent, in the biggest single addition to the system since it was built.

Except that the new line will also funnel more riders into the crowded downtown stations of a burdened and aging transit system that currently struggles to keep up with a backlog of repairs. The line is expanding the mouth of the bottle but not the neck. Any Metro rider during rush hour has seen the packed platforms downtown and waited in line to climb frozen escalators—now add more people.

The new line will also reduce service for some riders, because Metro is cramming another Virginia line into a tunnel under the Potomac River that literally cannot fit any more trains.

And the expansion may be coming before the rail system is actually ready. Service systemwide will likely be less reliable for years to come, because Metro won’t complete an expansion of its fleet of train cars until at least 2017.

It may also be coming too late to reform ungainly Tysons and to resuscitate Dulles Airport, which is already losing passengers to more accessible rivals.

For all this, the system’s cost per passenger will likely rise, leaving riders and taxpayers around the region to pay the bill. . . .

Click here to read the full article.