How Washington DC fixed their Metro’s biggest problem

A Silver Line appreciation video :^)

I visited my friend in #DC recently and was surprised to find a direct airport rail link, since many US cities don’t have that. I was even more surprised that it took over an hour, which takes this line into distances far beyond the scope of most metro systems.⁄

So I looked more into the Silver Line, and I’m pretty impressed.

I know it was over budget, somewhat unreliable, and hasn’t fully hit ridership targets. But it’s a #subway built after the turn of the century, when so many cities are going all in on #lightrail to save money.

It also demonstrates some rare collaboration between different states, counties, transit agencies, private landowners, and more - that’s something we can definitely learn from.

Enjoy the (somewhat) full story of the Silver Line :^)

00:00 Intro
01:27 Where it went wrong
03:13 Tysons Corner grows up
04:22 How did they fix it?
05:31 FUNding and special tax districts
08:31 2 separate tax districts
11:03 Other challenges: Tysons tunnel
12:32 Other challenges: Cracks in concrete
12:58 Other challenges: the big covid
13:18 Concluuuusion

[krinos]

“The best time to do it was 20 years ago. The second best time is now”

[gatorpika]

I live along the Silver line and it's really nice being able to shoot over to Dulles to get a flight on the Metro. The one thing that sucked though was, as an afterthought, the train platform feels like it's a mile away from the actual airport and you have to go through a bunch of confusing corridors. It's a hike to get into the terminal unlike at National where you just walk over the arrival road and you are inside. If you ever ride MARTA in Atlanta, the metro ends right at the terminal, though the rest of that system is kinda stupid.

[tyleralberico]

Your focus on funding is incredibly fascinating! It gives so much context that you wouldn’t get from just a regular review

[bracken]

I think all this just proves that the best way to fix congestion in a city is to just build more damn metro lines. Seriously, it's not that hard to fix traffic, politicians, just build a damn train for the cities.

[johnp]

Do a story on the Purple Line in Montgomery County. That project has died and come back to life multiple times. Also, regarding the Silver Line, structural concrete piers were constructed in the early 80s (before the West Falls Church Station) anticipating the flyover track needed for a future line to Dulles Airport. The Dulles Access Road was also constructed with room for a railway in the median. So rapid transit to Dulles was always the plan (or the dream) way back in the 60s.

[erichhouchens]

I grew up in the Washington area and remember in 1972 going to Transpo 72 which was held at Dulles International Airport. On display were several plans for rail lines, monorails and maglev's connecting DC to Dulles. It only took them 50 years to get the line built. BTW - the original system plan for Metro back in the 60's showed a "future" line to Dulles. There is a Wikipedia article on Transpo 72.

[beatrixcreighton-hkpd]

DAMNN!!! is it just me or is there a lot more high quality transit orientated videos being created nowadays ?! Im so glad im finding a lot more videos about what I thought was a niche topic! Crazy to see how many more people are into these sort of things, haha. Keep it up!! The editing is awesome!!!

[noahlindenberg]

DC resident here. I’ve lived here for 0:02 4 years (before and after the Dulles extension). It’s genuinely a game changer and having moved here from a car centric town, I can’t see many self moving back anywhere without a metro system. Plus, DC has one of the cleanest and most well maintained underground train systems I’ve seen in the US. Now if we can just figure out how to balance WMATAs budget, we’ll be a paragon of public transit in the US.

[Cyboogie]

I’m from Ashburn, the end of the new silver line corridor. Having the metro out here has made life so much easier

[mutedroar]

Being able to take the Silver line to the airport was so amazing when I lived in the DC area. Walk to the metro, chill until the airport. No traffic, no stress, and no airport parking costs.

[BreadDefender]

really enjoy the end which highlights the point that few people are going to remember all the delays and struggles in the process of building, but many will know and love the end result.

[lyannastarkweather]

As a Montgomery County native, the Metro played a major role in my life. I grew up within blocks of the Red Line and had regular access to buses that took me almost anywhere I needed. When I decided to save money by staying home for college, the Metro made it so I could commute to school relatively easily. I didn't obtain a driver's license or a car until I was 23 and needed to branch out further for employment opportunities.

[linkjag]

As someone who lived in DC for 7 years, the metro's actual biggest problems are inconsistency, closing far too early, and distance between stations the further out you get being so large that you may need to take a car or use the bus system to even get to a station in many residential areas. Loved this video though. When I was last in DC, the silver line was still only partially completed and it's great that there are more options for commuting from Virginia now

[jmchristoph]

A couple key things this piece misses:

1. Vienna & Bethesda weren't chosen by the two counties because of distinct development strategies. The Orange & Red Lines were both built deliberately along well-established corridors to leverage existing infrastructure &/or right-of-way to minimize costs. In the Orange Line case, it was the abandoned Washington & Old Dominion Railway, which by then had already been taken up for I-66. In the Red Line case, it was Connecticut Ave, which had previously hosted a streetcar line before the consolidated DC bus company ripped the tracks out in the '50s. As such, both corridors were already significantly developed as rail suburbs, though only the Red Line corridor retains some of that fabric today.

2. The Red Line wound up taking *far* longer to finish, because of inadequate geological surveys along the corridor. Instead of digging the tunnel through sediment or relatively soft rock like the rest of the system, the Red Line cuts through a block of solid granite running from the Potomac to Pennsylvania. As a result, it took over a decade longer to open the Red Line to Bethesda, than it did to open the Orange Line to Vienna. Had you actually filmed the Bethesda segment in Bethesda instead of Navy Yard, you would've seen a lot of development that *predated* Metro, because much of it was already there before Metro was planned to go there, and a lot of what got built because of Metro wound up finishing before the Red Line itself did.

3. The Silver Line didn't actually fix Metro's two biggest problems; in fact, in some ways it made them worse.

The first is core capacity: before the Silver Line, we used to refer to the "Orange Crush" caused by the sheer number of people trying to board the Orange Line between Ballston & Rosslyn, headed for Foggy Bottom & Farragut West. That section was limited to 13 trains per hour, because the tracks north of Rosslyn are shared with the Blue Line. Adding the Silver Line along the same route, only increased the number of trains that needed to pass through that bottleneck, and the only reason the Orange Crush isn't a thing anymore is because of the ridership decline of the 2010s precipitated by ridehailing & the Safetrack fiasco.

The second is operations funding: while this video covers the capital financing to get new Metro lines built, that's never been the real challenge for WMATA. The real challenge is that in its entire history, WMATA has never had a dedicated, permanent source of funding, & so has to beg the federal, state, & local governments it serves for money, literally every year, just to operate what the capital funding has built. This has made WMATA much more reliant on farebox recovery than systems which enjoy a half-cent sales tax or some other dedicated revenue stream. Where the Silver Line comes into that picture: it's the most expensive Metro line to operate per projected passenger-mile, and its ridership has not met those projections. To give a sense of scale, Metro had to construct an entirely new train control center and a new fourth dispatching zone, just for the two branches west of Falls Church, because the sheer number of train movements is equivalent to the three existing dispatching zones that comprise the rest of the system. But for all those train movements, the number of *passengers* moved is fully two orders of magnitude lower than what a Metro line has the capability to move.

So when capacity in the system core is constrained, and demand in the system core is high, you can imagine that most of us who've lived here for a while have been pushing not for the Silver Line, but for new lines Downtown. Unfortunately, electeds of decades past weren't receptive to those arguments, and so we got the Silver Line instead of a line to Georgetown or Logan Circle or H St NE. Fortunately, it seems that message is finally getting across, because WMATA is currently studying rerouting either the Blue or Silver Line downtown to create the new capacity needed to let the Silver Line do the job it's supposed to. But again unfortunately, all work on that planning has stalled because Metro is once again almost out of money & so all the effort is going to lobbying in Annapolis & Richmond to keep its operations funded.

[oogie]

As a DC native, thank you for this high quality video. The silver line is often overlooked by many! It's history is definitely interesting and your narrative is perfect.

[TheIrishSpectre]

As someone who lives in Tysons (specifically in one of the buildings in the wide aerial shot), two things: 1) wild to see my building in a YouTube video, even at a distance; 2) can’t overstate how crucial the Silver Line is for me. Made it entirely possible to live & work in Tysons while still having DC close at hand, particularly during rush hour when trying to drive in on 267 or I-66 would be a disaster, to say nothing of traffic in DC itself.

Great video on the history and challenges of the line!

[Moonob]

A funny thing that I have to contribute is that in the early 2000s the metro system payed my grandfather to analyze the whole system and make a plan to fix the metros problems
They shelved it.
He spent like 6 months on this project, had his binder of solutions, and they just shelved it. I don’t know if they have ever gone back and used any of the stuff he put together for them, but it is a personal favorite story.

[davidalade]

I live right off of the Mclean station of the Silver line. I couldn't imagine this area without the silver line and it's connection to DC and Dulles airport. The addition of the metro has made the whole tysons area much more desirable to live and work in.

[yusasami]

I’m from the dmv and this fills me with so much pride. Love how my region is growing and cant wait to see it continue

[gideon]

As someone who grew up around the silver line, I always remember asking my parents why it wasn't here and getting an answer of basically "people disagree if we should make a tunnel or not", this was honestly a lot of news even I didn't know! Now, whenever my bf and I pass a train he always points and says "WMATA BABY!" Nice video!