Roger Lewis writes in the Post about Arlington’s foresight in building the Orange Line where it did:

Arlington planners and politicians were bold, optimistic and foresighted. They insisted that the Orange Line to Vienna run underground through Arlington, following Wilson Boulevard and Fairfax Drive, rather than running along the Interstate 66 right of way … They expected that billions of dollars of private real estate investment would be attracted to the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor … Yet in the 1960s, Arlington’s leaders had no crystal ball. They simply had faith that properly located rail transit would catalyze the revitalization of what was then a suburban strip of spotty, low-density commercial properties.

There’s one burning question I’ve been wondering about for a while: why? Planners in Fairfax County made the opposite decision. Montgomery County officials got the Red Line underground and did zone densely in Bethesda and Silver Spring, but spaced their stations widely and ended up with mostly strip-mall development on the rest of the corridor (as Lewis discusses in the piece). Bay Area counties put BART along their freeway medians, creating a system that was almost entirely park-and-ride outside San Francisco.

All of these jurisdictions had the same information at the same time. They all knew rail was expensive. They all had NIMBY neighbors who wanted to keep their towns low density (According to Schrag, Arlington had a group called Co-Opt pushing for downzoning around Metro stations; a similar group in Montgomery got Takoma Park downzoned to single-family homes).

Nevertheless, yet Arlington leaders not only decided to build a denser, transit-oriented corridor but pushed incredibly hard to get WMATA and its predecessor, NCTA, to put the line under Wilson instead of I-66 where it was originally drawn. How did they do it? Were there a few visionary planners in Arlington? A general culture of smart planning? Especially farsighted politicians? A different political climate? In short, why did Arlington make one decision, while most other jurisdictions in Greater Washington and around the country made the exact opposite?

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Tagged: arlington, development, smart growth, transit, virginia, wmata

David Alpert created Greater Greater Washington in 2008 and was its executive director until 2020. He formerly worked in tech and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco Bay, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He lives with his wife and two children in Dupont Circle.