Union Station in DC by BeyondDC licensed under Creative Commons.

Union Station, the nexus of travel for more than 37 million people each year, is set for a multi-billion dollar upgrade to bring this transportation hub and its surrounding facilities up to date. There is only one problem — parking.

A growing number of organizations, neighborhood groups, and public officials have expressed concerns over just how many parking spaces the station needs. Many leaders see a reduction in parking as leaning into a transportation future that is less car-dependent.

Late last month, the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), which is leading the way on the project, extended the comment period for the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) on one of its biggest undertakings, the Union Station Expansion Project (USEP), an extra 60 days, from July 30 to September 28. If recent briefings, presentations, and interviews are any indicator, that extension was very much needed.

What’s at stake?

Currently, the station serves millions of riders while connecting the region to Amtrak intercity trains, Metrorail, MARC and VRE commuter, intercity and local bus services, and DC Streetcar and for-hire vehicles. The project will already be a massive multi-year and multibillion dollar undertaking, with slated plans to upgrade platforms, ease passenger bottleneck and expand to meet expected ridership growth.

The DEIS has progressed somewhat closer towards the goals envisioned by longtime supporters of the expansion project like the Greater Washington Partnership, the Federal City Council, the Coalition for Smarter Growth, and Virginians for High Speed Rail, local Advisory Neighborhood Commissioners, and other local officials, compared to earlier versions, with the very notable exception of the number of parking spaces included in the project.

At the same time, these supporters largely agree that the amount of parking could be reduced much further, the plans for increasing bike access and storage could be clearer, and the DEIS could do more to take into account the growing regional interest in “through-running” commuter rail trains from Maryland into Virginia or vice versa.

So here’s where things currently stand with the Union Station Expansion Project as its organizers prepare to head into the final stage of the DEIS.

A rendering of Union Station from the DEIS Image by Federal Railroad Administration.

The number of parking spaces is still in flux

Unsurprisingly, one of the biggest issues still remaining to be settled for the future of Union Station is just how much parking it will have. As it currently stands in the DEIS, that number, 1,600 parking spaces in the Preferred Alternative, would mark a significant decrease from the current capacity at Union Station, 2,220 spaces (Closer to 2,400 spaces when rental spaces are counted). But many of the project’s advocates think that number can be pushed even further downwards from 1,600.

A growing number of voices are calling for less parking. DC Office of Planning (OP) Director Andrew Trueblood wrote a letter to the FRA late last April recommending between 299 and 375 spaces for the USEP, at most less than four times the amount of spaces currently included in the DEIS, according to a press release issued last month by the office of DC Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, who is supporting OP in that recommendation.

In fact, Norton herself has written to the relevant US House Appropriations subcommittee asking it to “include report language expressing concerns” with the FRA’s plans to include a parking deck in the USEP and asking the FRA to work with DC’s government to “develop a revised plan with fewer parking spaces,” a request the subcommittee has since honored.

Moreover, at a July 9 meeting partially held to discuss the project, members of the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC) threatened not to approve it without a substantial reduction in parking, warning that they themselves could cut hundreds of parking spaces from the project unless the FRA does so first, possibly by eliminating the 1,575-space above-ground parking garage the agency has included in the DEIS. It’s the NCPC, not the FRA, which retains jurisdiction over projects on federally controlled land, including Union Station, so their approval is essential for the Union Station Expansion Project to go forward.

Other organizations and agencies who’ve raised concerns about the amount of parking in the DEIS include the Greater Washington Partnership and the Federal City Council, a nonprofit organization specifically devoted to advancing DC civic life.

“Others share our concerns as they’ve been phrased to the FRA from many different stakeholders,” said Maura Brophy, Director of Transportation and Infrastructure for the Federal City Council. “I’m hopeful that they will hear us on this and we’ll be able to guide this in the right direction.”

Stewart Schwartz, Executive Director of the Coalition for Smarter Growth called for a deeper dive into how consultants for draft documents arrived at the current number of parking spaces.

“From a big picture perspective and as we’ve learned during the pandemic and from what European cities have been able to achieve, our goal is to minimize the use of cars in (Washington, DC) and to maximize the use of transit, walking, bikes, and other shared vehicles,” Schwartz said. “And a big part of that is outright reducing the amount of parking and certainly fully market pricing parking, as well as other solutions such as shared parking.”

Another key player in the Union Station redevelopment process with serious objections to the DEIS’ current level of parking is Akridge, the DC-based developer which owns the air rights above Union Station and has been working on a sister project above the Amtrak rail yard called Burnham Place for over a decade. Akridge is especially opposed to the plan’s use of an above-ground parking garage, which Akridge Vice President of Development David Tuchmann thinks would hinder both Union Station and Burnham Place’s attempts to create a stronger sense of, well, “place.”

“If you look at how stations predominately in Europe and in Asia have been successful in making the stations very high-capacity,” said Tuchmann, “they’ve done that not by getting cars right up to the edge of the station by building large parking garages for a very small fraction of travelers who are going to park there as a percentage of the total ridership. You do it by making the station at its edges a wonderful place that people want to be able to walk to.”

Even Amtrak’s on record as stating that its employees would not need the amount of parking the FRA’s plans are currently set to provide them and the Union Station Redevelopment Corporation (USRC), which has relied on parking for a substantial part of its revenues in the past has made it increasingly clear that it’s willing to “disconnect” the issue of revenue for Union Station’s upkeep and maintenance from that of parking.

Other project stakeholders would likely still have to help the USRC find some replacement revenue sources, such as an annual earmark or an Amtrak ticket fee, but even so, that would still clear up what had long seemed like a significant obstacle to reducing parking at Union Station.

And with a 2019 survey by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments (MWCOG) already showing the parking demand at the Greater Washington region’s three main airports dropping by up to 44% from 2017 almost a full year before the COVID-19 pandemic, those replacement revenue sources might just be a better bet in the long run anyhow. Especially for a train station which already sees over 37 million visitors per year, more than any single one of those airports.

FRA senior adviser David Valenstein told the Washington Business Journal last week that the agency would consider reducing the amount of parking in the project before sending any final draft to the NCPC for their approval and an FRA spokesperson also told the WBJ that the agency would “carefully consider all public comments” on the DEIS. They did not, however, commit to developing a reduced parking plan, at least not yet.

Union Station in DC by m01229 licensed under Creative Commons.

More clarity is needed around the plan for pick up, drop off areas

Many of the groups’ largest remaining concerns about the Union Station DEIS besides parking revolve around a relative lack of specifics on certain issues mentioned in the plan. Take, for example, PUDO (Pick Up, Drop Off) areas, where taxis, ride-hailing vehicles, and delivery trucks all make short stops.

The DEIS does call for all six lanes of traffic on the north side of Columbus Circle in front of Union Station to be retained, with the “hop-on/hop-off” sightseeing buses currently using the two central lanes there moving to G Street NE to free up space for non-taxi PUDO, along with a couple other improvements.

Nevertheless, Brophy and the Federal City Council believe there’s a need to refine these plans. “The PUDO experience in front of the station today already involves significant traffic congestion, and does not prioritize pedestrians. With a more than doubling of the number of pick up and drop off trips in the future, a centralized, high-capacity, off-street PUDO facility will be needed in order to avoid a worsening of the current problems. The DEIS does not include such a facility,” Brophy said. “It’s important that FRA takes the feedback of stakeholders to ensure we get this right.”

Tuchmann was even more explicit about the need for the DEIS’ planners to rethink the PUDO process, once again in large part because of their intention to build a larger parking garage above ground instead of a smaller one below ground.

“What we are seeing is an explosion of pickup and dropoff activity replacing, along with transit use and along with biking, what used to be private car trips to park at airports and at stations,” Tuchmann said, noting that many of the alternatives the DEIS rejected in favor of its Preferred Alternative actually called for the inclusion of enough underground parking spaces, including PUDO, to easily match the amount of total parking OP and DDOT have requested.

“Virtually every land use that’s proposed in Washington, DC, if it has parking, puts that parking below grade,” Tuchmann explained. “With office buildings, apartment buildings, shopping complexes, we don’t see large garages being proposed or approved, it’s no different at such an important location where there should be high-quality urban design and transit oriented development. Moving the vehicles out of the way of the pedestrians and prioritizing people over cars makes a whole lot of sense and can be accomplished by putting (at least some) PUDO, as well as parking below grade.”

Tuchmann also echoed NCPC and OP’s suggestion that some dropoff traffic like taxis and ride-hailing also be matched with a pickup trip as often as possible and expressed interest in potentially putting parklets in some of the space freed up by moving some PUDO spaces underground.

As for the intercity bus station part of the project, Schwartz indicated that issue was also more than a little connected to parking as well.

“There is a dispute between what the study’s recommending, what the bus operators are asking for, and what others think they need,” Schwartz said, though also making sure to stress the CSG’s praise for the decision to move DC’s bus terminal from First Street to Union Station in 2012.

“We’re trying to minimize the level of the combined parking of the structure and allow for redevelopment. The bigger problem is parking but even on the intercity buses, the questions are can you keep it to one level rather than two, how many waiting spaces do you need for the buses, how can you manage the spaces so you don’t need quite as many bus spaces for pickup and dropoff for intercity bus. There’s sort of a capacity/operational management/design issue in that, all tied to just trying not to oversize the square footage of the bus station in return for allowing more transit-oriented development.”

Bike parking at Union Station by Elly Blue licensed under Creative Commons.

What about bikes and rail expansion?

Finally, there are a couple more issues transit advocates would like to see addressed in slightly more detail before the next stage of the DEIS: bike facilities and rail expansion. Schwartz said he was pleased the USEP’s planners were trying to improve the circulation for cyclists on the west side of Union Station. “It’s a safety disaster right now with all those bizarre weaved roads right there,” he said. Nevertheless, the current version of the DEIS only offers rather modest improvements to the station’s current bike access and storage, with approximately 105 new Capital Bikeshare spots being added, along with storage capacity for about 200 bicycles.

As for rail, the DEIS does contain some projections for how much it expects the passenger volume of each rail system currently using Union Station to grow over the next 20 years, including MARC projections where “Of 14 peak-hour Penn Line trains, it is anticipated that eight would continue to Virginia.”

But none of those projections currently allow for the possibility of MARC’s other two routes, the Penn and Brunswick Lines “through-running” trains to Virginia or VRE’s two branches, the Fredericksburg and Manassas Lines through-running into Maryland, despite a study that found at least some limited demand for those options. That may partially be a reflection of the amount of stakeholders involved, according to one Virginia transit official and longtime rail expert.

“Through-running commuter rail service is something that needs to be looked at and examined much more thoroughly,” said Daniel Plaugher, who serves as both Deputy Director of the Virginia Transit Association, a coalition of every transit agency in Virginia, as well as Executive Director of Virginians For High Speed Rail. “And it has to be a partnership between Maryland, DC, and Virginia because you’re dealing with so many different governmental entities. VRE itself is a compact between two regional organizations here in Virginia. And so you have that, you have MARC being run by the Maryland Department of Transportation, and even though DC doesn’t necessarily pay for either service, those two trains have to go through the District of Columbia and Union Station.”

With so many cooks involved in this one issue, each party brings their own separate issues to the table, including capacity on Virginia’s side and capacity to pay for service on Maryland’s side, leading Plaugher to suggest that it might be best if Virginia and Maryland teamed up for a joint study of the possibility of through-running, including how to build the capacity for that into the USEP.

As much as many of the stakeholders involved in the Union Station Expansion Project still have concerns about individual aspects of the DEIS, pretty much all of them stress that they’re less about disliking the overall direction of the plan and more about the need to take advantage of what they each see as literally a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

“It would be a hugely missed opportunity if the improved station did not have the maximum possible impact on the city,” Brophy said. “We need to make sure that we are truly thinking about this as the station that will serve this region for the next century.”

Alex Holt is a New York state native, Maryland transplant, and freelance writer. He lives in Mt. Washington in Baltimore and enjoys geeking out about all things transit, sports, politics, and comics, not necessarily in that order. He was formerly GGWash's Maryland Correspondent.