To the Editor:
I could not help but read the "Metrorail Phase 1 Nears Completion" [Connection, March 20-26, 2013] article in today's paper with… well… anger? I should be excited for the Metro's completion. After all, we live just 1.5 miles from the Greensboro Metro station and have never found it very convenient to drive to one of the Orange Line Metro stops in order to take Metro going to work, so we have always driven to work… right through Tysons. This new Silver Line is so much more convenient, and finally we will be able to take advantage of our metro benefits, keep our cars off the roads, and metro to work! Or not. I continue to be dumbfounded at the narrow-minded thinking of the planners who insisted that there should be no parking at any of the four Tyson's Metro stops in order to make Tysons a more walkable urban center. That may work fine in an area with dense housing in immediate proximity to the metro, but the area around Tysons hardly meets that description with its acres upon acres of car dealerships, malls and office buildings. And how does not having parking make Tysons more walkable? I, and many others, will have to continue to drive our cars through their nice urban village… leaving our carbon emissions in their nice pedestrian air… in order to get to work… or get ourselves to a Metro that does provide parking so we can take advantage of our mass transit system. We cannot have a walkable community if we must take our cars everywhere rather than use mass transit. Clearly, this metro rail was not meant to assist local residents. It won't help us get to work, and it won't help us get to the airport. I guess area residents were quite purposefully left out of the equation. This is someone's Metro for sure… it's just not ours. Oh, and did I mention the folks who looked at the house for sale nearby but opted to buy elsewhere once they found out that they could not Metro to work on the new Silver Line? You lose any benefit of living by the Metro if you can't get to it.
Lynn Spencer
Vienna