[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 147 (2001), Part 4] [Senate] [Pages 5080-5082] [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov][[Page 5080]] 25TH ANNIVERSARY OF WASHINGTON METRO Mr. SARBANES. Mr. President, tomorrow, March 29, 2001, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority will celebrate the 25th Anniversary of passenger service on the Metrorail system. I want to take this opportunity to congratulate WMATA on this important occasion and to recognize the extraordinary contribution Metro has made to this region and to our Nation. For the past quarter century, the Washington Metro system has served as a shining example of a public investment in the Washington Metropolitan area's future. It provides a unified and coordinated transportation system for the region, enhances mobility for the millions of residents, visitors and the federal workforce in the region, promotes orderly growth and development of the region, enhances our environment, and preserves the beauty and dignity of our Nation's Capital. It is also an example of an unparalleled partnership that spans every level of government from city to state to federal. Since passenger service first began in 1976, Metrorail has grown from a 4.6 mile, five station, 22,000 passenger service to a comprehensive 103-mile, 83 station, and 600,000 passenger system serving the entire metropolitan region, and with even more service and stations on a fast track toward completion. Today, the Metro system is the second busiest rapid transit operation in the country, carrying nearly one-fifth of the region's daily commuters traveling to the metropolitan core and taking more than 270,000 vehicles off the roads every day. It is also one of the finest, cleanest, safest and most reliable transportation systems in the Nation. Reaching this important milestone has not been an easy task, by any measure. It took extraordinary vision and perseverance to build the 103 mile subway system over the past twenty-five years and, as the Washington Post has recently underscored in two articles about the Metro system, it will require an equal or even greater commitment to address the challenges that lie ahead. I ask unanimous consent that the text of the first of these articles be included in the Record immediately following my statement. The great communities throughout the world are the ones that have worked to preserve and enhance their historic and natural resources; provide good transportation systems for citizens to move to their places of employment and to public facilities freely; and invest in neighborhoods and local business districts. These are among the things that contribute to the livability of our communities and enrich the lives of our citizens. I submit that the Metro system and the regional cooperation which it has helped foster has helped make this region a community in which we can all be proud. This week's celebration is a tribute to everyone involved in the continuing intergovernmental effort to provide mass transit to the people of the Washington Metropolitan area--those local, State and federal officials who had the vision to begin this project 25 years ago and who have worked so steadfastly over the years to support the system. This foresight has been well rewarded and I join in celebrating this special occasion. There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows: [From the Washington Post, Mar. 25, 2001] Region's Subway System Begins to Show Its Age (By Lyndsey Layton) As Washington's Metro trains hummed to life 25 years ago, many people didn't know what to expect. It was, after all, among the first U.S. subway systems built from scratch, rather than cobbled together from several existing railroads, as in New York and Boston. But from its opening on March 27, 1976, Metro was a new American monument. Embraced by locals and tourists, it became a $9.4 billion model for moving people swiftly between suburbs and the city. Riders have lately flocked to Metro faster than it can buy rail cars to carry them, a fortune never anticipated by its designers. The Metro would provide to be far more than a people mover. It shaped the region in dramatic ways, turning the village of Bethesda into a small city, reviving sagging Clarendon, pumping new life into downtown by creating mass transit access that eventually lured the MCI Center and its professional sports teams to Gallery Place. The Metro system has become--among many other things--a gathering place, a unifier, a matchmarker, a land developer, an economic power and a community planner. But while Metro fulfilled some dreams, it left others unrealized. Ideas that made sense when the subway was built turned out to be mistakes. Escalators open to the sky are falling apart after decades of soaking in rain and snow. The two-track design of the railroad is too simple for increasing demands for service. Metro is lapping up tax dollars to keep its aging equipment running. And the rail lines don't reach where most movement now takes place: suburb to suburb. Transit managers have grand visions for Metro's next 25 years: They want to connect major suburbs with rail and to use the more flexible bus system to follow the market, joining suburbs, carrying the spillover from rail lines, stepping in to fill gaps. They dream of a transit system that forges the region's destiny for the next quarter-century as it did for the past. Molding the Region The transit system has sprouted restaurant rows in Bethesda and Ballston, shops and offices in Pentagon City and around Union station, affordable housing in Virginia Square, economic revival on U Street. Metro means cheap mobility for college students. It has helped diversify the inner suburbs, encouraging immigrants from Bolivia and Peru to settle in Arlington. It made it possible for many of the 300,000 federal employees to buy single-family homes in close-in communities and work in downtown Washington. It even gave a name to the neighborhood of Friendship Heights, which most called Chevy Chase in the days before the subway station. Metro has tied together a region fractured by state lines, race and class. ``You've got people of different races, different classes, different job descriptions, from city and from suburb, old and young, able and disabled,'' said Zachary Schrag, a graduate student at Columbia University who is writing his dissertation about the Metro. ``And they actually treat each other pretty civilly most of the time.'' Moving People Alan Sussman studies Torah on the Red Line. Frank Lloyd takes his twin girls for all-day rides as a cheap diversion. Oren Hirsch, 14, always tries to claim the seat directly behind the operator so he can peer through the smoked-glass window and watch the controls and the track bed rushing under the train. Metro is carrying about 600,000 passengers a day on its trains and 500,000 on buses, making it the nation's second- busiest transit system behind New York's. That's a ranking that none of the original planners dreamed of when they were designing the system in the late 1960s. ``I'm a believer, and it has even outstripped my expectations,'' said Cleatus Barnett, 73, who was appointed to the Metro board of directors in 1971 and is the longest continually serving member. The subway takes more than 270,000 cars off the road each day, Metro officials say. Those cars would have used more than 12 million gallons of gasoline a year and needed 30 additional highway lanes and 1,800 acres of parking. Mary Margaret Whipple, a state senator from Arlington and a past member of the Metro board, puts it this way, ``One hundred thousand people a day go underneath Arlington on the Metro system instead of through Arlington in their cars.'' As highway traffic gets worse, subway ridership has soared. Ridership records are shattered regularly, thanks in part to a robust economy, strong tourism, a new transit subsidy extended to federal workers and fares that haven't increased since 1995. an early vision Before it opened, Metro had trouble recruiting workers, who were wary abut toiling in the dark underground. ``All people knew about subways was New York,'' said Christopher Scripp, a Cleveland Park Station manager, who was a Metrobus driver when he became one of the first subway employees. The architect, Harry M. Weese, had been sent on a tour of European subways with instructions to combine the world's best designs into a new American monument. Weese dreamed big, and a legion of engineers followed his concept to launch a transit system that would eventually cost $9.4 billion and stretch 103 miles across two rivers, two states and the District. With their coffered concrete arches and floating mezzanines lighted dramatically from below, the stations were celebrated by everyone from architecture critics to construction workers. design problems But planners can see only so far into the future. What they failed to recognize as a service area--the edge cities outside the orbit of downtown Washington--has left Metro with the challenge of trying to be useful to people who don't live or work where the subway lines run. [[Page 5081]] They plotted a hub-and-spoke pattern of five lines with 83 stations stretching from the suburbs to the center of the District to ferry federal workers from homes to offices. But development patterns have since strayed, creating suburban communities and office centers far from the subway lines in upper Montgomery, Howard, Southern Maryland, western Fairfax, Loudoun and Prince William. Those patterns are going to intensify. In another 25 years, two-thirds of all daily trips in the region will be from suburb to suburb, according to the region's Transportation Planning Board. Transit advocates have been lobbying for several years for a Purple Line to connect Bethesda in Montgomery County with New Carrollton in Prince George's County. Advocates say the Purple Line is the best bet for a fast connection between the counties, since the proposed intercounty connector linking I-270 and I-95 has been sidelined. Metro planners are also looking at ways to connect Prince George's County with Alexandria by running rail over the new Woodrow Wilson Bridge. Metro has started several new suburb-to-suburb bus routes, though it acknowledges buses are a far cry from rapid rail service. changing communities The original 103-mile Metro system was finished in January, when the final five stations opened on the Green Line in the District and Prince George's. While Metro is primarily a people mover, it also can change the look and feel of a community, for better or worse. Even in neighborhoods that waited many years for Metro service, people have mixed feelings about living on the subway line. ``The more accessible transportation is, the more likely developers are going to come into your neighborhood and price you out,'' said Brenda Richardson, a consultant who runs her firm, Women Like Us, from he rented home five blocks from the new Congress Heights Station. ``People here are worried about being displaced. We feel like we stayed here when things were awful, and now that the community is a prime place for development, we're going to be booted out.... Gentrification to a lot of black folks means the white folks are coming.'' Communities like Arlington and Bethesda either require affordable housing near Metro stations or offer incentives to developers who set aside a portion of a project to affordable housing. Richardson wants a similar protection in the District. ``I don't like the idea that Metro can destabilize communities,'' she said. ``There needs to be some sort of policy that is set so that when Metro comes into neighborhoods, developers are not at liberty to push out longtime residents, seniors and renters.'' Exactly how Metro changes a community has plenty to do with the decisions made by the community's own planners and leaders. Metro is the reason some places, like Bethesda or the stretch between Rosslyn and Ballston in Arlington, have seen thriving ``urban villages'' sprout up around their stations while other spots, such as Rhode Island Avenue in the District or Addison Road in Prince George's have stations that are relatively isolated and undeveloped. arlington's model Arlington County is widely seen as the gold standard for molding growth around Metro. Along the five-station corridor from Rosslyn to Ballston, which opened in 1979, Arlington leveraged the subway stations to attract jobs, housing and commercial development. ``There is no better success story,'' said Stewart Schwartz, of the Coalition for Smarter Growth. The story starts with Arlington leaders, who recognized early on that Metro could be powerful enough to revitalize the sagging commercial corridor between Rosslyn and Ballston. They fought to change the route of the subway, which had been planned along the median of I-66, and convinced Arlington taxpayers it would be worthwhile to pay extra to burrow the subway underground and pull it south to run between Wilson and Clarendon boulevards. They worked with residents to establish a vision for the development they wanted and wrote zoning laws to make it happen. The plan was high-density, high-rise office, retail and residential space next to the stations, with a gradual tapering in height so that single-family homes remained untouched just two or three blocks away. The streets around the stations welcome pedestrians, not cars. There is no Metro parking. ``We were willing to go through a major community transformation in order to maximize the value of this transit system,'' Whipple said. ``The feeling was that people could live and work near transit, and it should have a beneficial effect. And it has. We simply don't have the kinds of traffic problems that exist elsewhere.'' With offices, shops and housing near Metro, the station becomes as much destination as origin. Trains are full coming and going. That's not the case for most suburban Metro stations. ``Most of the trains leave most of the stations most of the time essentially empty,'' said Ed Risse, a Vienna-based consultant who has closely studied the link between urban development and public transit systems such as Metro. ``In the morning, it's crowded and uncomfortable. But going in at midday and out in the morning, there are huge amounts of unused capacity. Looking ahead to the next 30 years, we need to much more efficiently use that capacity.'' Other Approaches Fairfax County, meanwhile, largely squashed attempts to develop commercial and retail property around its Orange Line Metro stations. Risse worked on five different projects to develop land around the Vienna Metro station--they all failed to win approval. County supervisors said they recognize that some development may be healthy at some stations and have approved a new zoning category that allows higher-density projects near Metro. But Risse said the county is far from ready to embrace ``transit villages.'' ``If you undertake transit-related development at Vienna or any of those stations, it's a long, acrimonious process,'' he said. ``There are vocal people who want to drive to the station, park and use it. A larger group wants others to drive to the station so they can keep driving. And the third group lives near the station and doesn't want anything built there.'' By contrast, Prince George's County has struggled to lure developers to its Metro stations. Most of its larger employers near Metro stations are federal agencies. Many of its stations are hard to reach by foot and are surrounded by large parking lots or garages. ``Prince George's took a $10 billion investment and put it on the shelf,'' Schwartz said. ``The bottom line is, today there are four spurs of the Metro system in Prince George's-- more than any other jurisdiction--and very little development.'' Prince George's planners forecast little additional development 25 years form now. Using projections made by local counties, the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments created a map that predicts regional development by 2025. It shows that Prince George's offices expect few projects to be built around their Metro stations. Metro was one of the first transit agencies in the country to sell or lease land it owns near stations. To date, Metro has approved about 40 such projects, of which 27 have been built and generate about $6 million in annual revenue for the agency. Metro has identified about 400 additional acres it wants to develop. Roads and Rails Critics, such as the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, say Metro could be more aggressive in developing projects around its stations and that too much land is developed to parking and roads. The environmental group says Metro should instead develop shops, offices and restaurants so people would ride the trains to--as well as from--the station, to invigorate the community. But Metro General Manager Richard A. White said the system has historically stayed out of local affairs. Meanwhile, the road network carries the load that Metro can't. The high-tech corridor of Northern Virginia, the biotech community in Montgomery County and the Navy's expanding air station in Southern Maryland are fed by congested highways or the overwhelmed Capital Beltway. While 40 percent of the region rides mass transit into the core of Washington, the remaining 60 percent travel by automobile. And when you consider the total number of daily trips taken throughout the Washington region--including outer suburbs far from Metro--the percentage carried by transit drops to about 5 percent. ``There's just a limited number of people who can use it,'' said Bob Chase, of the Northern Virginia Transportation Alliance. ``If you live in Ballston and work in Farragut Square, fine. But that's not a lot of people.'' Still, the subway has a strong public image. In a recent poll of riders and non-riders conducted by Metro, 69 percent said they felt positively or very positively about Metro. ``Most people are for mass transit because they believe everyone else can use it,'' Chase said. ``They're driving down the road and they're thinking, `Gee, if we only had transit, everyone else would ride it and get out of my way.' '' Even as they celebrated the completion of the original system, Metro officials were working on three new projects-- extending the Blue Line to Largo in Prince George's, building a New York Avenue station on the Red Line and extending rail to Dulles International Airport, with stops in Tysons Corner. As Metro starts digging the rail bed for the new century, some say it should correct its mistakes. ``If they just run [rail to Dulles] out the highway median and don't focus on development at the stations, it will be a wasted investment,'' Schwartz said. If Metro won't pull the rail to Dulles off the Dulles Toll Road and route it into the heart of the suburbs, it should make the [[Page 5082]] most of the stations along the highway, Risse and Schwartz said. They want stations of the new millennium to be built on platforms over the highway that would also support stores, offices and housing--all of it rising into the sky over the roadway. ``While there is record ridership and we are doing a good job, it's like having a Class C basketball team beating all its opponents and saying that's good enough,'' Risse said. ``But there's Class B and Class A and Class AA. There's no reason this transit system can't be Class AA.'' ____________________