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There were two articles in the Washington Post this past week that speak volumes on the traffic and related quality of life issues in the Northern Virginia suburbs. Catching up in my RSS feeds and reading them consecutively was very interesting, if not a little daunting and depressing about potential solutions to the traffic woes in the Washington area.

One article looks at efforts and considerations of making Tysons Corner (where I work) more pedestrian friendly. For those not familiar with the Washington area, Tysons Corner is a retail and business center at the intersections of Route 7, Route 123 and the Capital Beltway (Interstate 495) in the Virginia suburbs. Its a traffic and business nexus that grew up mostly in the 1980s and 1990s, and is (a close) second only to downtown Washington itself as a job center in the Washington metro area.

I can say what follows with the authority that can only come from experience: to try to walk anywhere in Tysons is to take your life into your own hands. The sidewalks in Tysons Corner are very few and far between, and generally there are hills, lawns and barriers that one has to climb over to get from point A to point B. Among other things, crawling over these barriers make one question their own adulthood. In terms of dealing with traffic, pedestrians have less than no rights on the streets of Tysons Corner. Suffice it to say that the plans under consideration to transform Tysons Corner into a pedestrian-friendly city center are quite pricey, such that the opposition to making these changes is likely to be enormous.

A very related topic is the fact that preliminary engineering surveys of the plans to extend Metrorail from West Falls Church out to Dulles Airport through Tysons Corner and Reston are likely to cost 60 percent more than previously estimated, a hefty $2.4 billion. This is truly disastrous, because the financing for the original estimate of the cost to extend the metro out to Dulles (i.e. very near to where I live) resulted in extremely careful negotiation and agreement among the local jurisdictions in the Dulles corridor, the Commonwealth of Virginia and the federal government. My congressman, Frank Wolf, who was a firm supporter of the federal funding for the rail extension indicated that he is very skeptical of the federal governments willingness to fund the project beyond the already agreed funding levels:

“The state is going to have to go back and make those numbers work,” said Dan Scandling, a spokesman for Rep. Frank R. Wolf (R-Va.), who has been instrumental in pushing for federal financial support for the project. “This is the state’s project. They hired the engineers and put the financing plan together. They have to explain how these numbers are going to work — or are not going to work.”

As somebody who commutes from Dulles to Tysons each day, these stories are of significant concern. The current traffic woes in Northern Virginia are putting a real damper on both the quality of life and the ability of the region to grow. A rail link to unite the business and residential centers of Northern Virginia to one another as well as the core of Washington is, in my opinion, a necessary remedy to the current situation.