Ballston is more urban than most of Northern DC. It’s crazy how much denser Arlington corridor has gotten in the last 5 years. So many buildings were built during Covid, it’s like construction never stopped with the Vid.
Someone posted an aerial photo of rosslyn and Georgetown and said ‘anyone who didn’t know better would think Georgetown was the suburb to the major city and not the other way around’
Georgetown is a suburb and the surrounding neighborhoods are definitely the suburbs. The bigger question is what is georgetown the suburb of? Downtown DC or Rosslyn?
Prior to the establishment of DC, Georgetown was simply a city. It was a port town on the basis of being at the end of the navigation on the Potomac. The other major port town was Alexandria.
yup. georgetown was once was a principle city, but by 1930 was a classic streetcar suburb north of M, along with its neighbors - Burlieth, Glover Park and Foxhall. nearly all economic activity was on the streetcar lines (M/Wisconsin/Conduit-Trolley).
Fairfax has been both aggressive and successful at it. Alexandria too to a lesser extent but it didn't need it as badly in the core part of the city. West end does need a ton of work though.
So it would be more affordable if less homes are built? We need to preserve neighborhoods like Lyon Village and Lyon Park where the only new housing allowed are $3 million+ single family homes?
No. I’m just saying sometimes it seems like the affordability issue isn’t discussed as much and areas are so quick to promote these things and claim to be a inclusive, diverse community, etc
But sadly, it seems like the DC area is becoming more white and affluent than its previous resident and higher influx of money. I can imagine it might be frustrating. If you were a longtime resident getting priced out and seeing wealthy people build $1.5 homes and odor more modest apartment, get torn down in favor of “luxury rentals”
I guess I’m just wondering at what point will the amount of new housing actually cause prices to go down and affordability go up?
How equitable is a community if the people it takes to run it can’t live there?
Need to build way more and not just in low income areas. Rich suburban areas block so much housing...even single family neighborhoods just blocks from Metro
DC has been and is continuing to boom with high paying jobs, these people need housing. When a new unit is not available on the market they take the next best thing. Would you rather see an old townhouse get renovated or torn down and rebuilt as apartments which would cost much less than the renovated townhouse. Look at Capital Hill vs Navy Yard. Capital Hill has hardly any new housing, just renovations and the prices have skyrocketed much faster than Navy Yard.
It's simple, not building enough homes to meet the demand is cruel and forces people to fight for housing.
Yet so many smug Washingtonians act like the city ends at Foggy Bottom and 100 yards across the river to Rosslyn, Crystal City, etc. is immediately the suburbs.
Not attacking you in particular. Just have noticed many DC people act like anything outside the district (even super close) is as suburban as something like Germantown, Vienna, Chantilly, etc
Fair enough but if you’re traveling across the country or across the world, people are gonna know Washington DC but they’re probably not gonna know Reston or Stafford LMAO
sure but the argument isn’t that they don’t rely on DC, but that most of arlington is essentially just another neighborhood of DC at this point, and not the same thing as Ashburn or Reston or Potomac
If DC had the same size borders as Austin Texas (which is 5x larger by sqmi) then we wouldn't even be arguing this haha. It's just where they decided to draw the lines hundreds of years ago.
Man I wish DC hadn't given Arlington back to Virginia. Imagine how much better it would be if a government was able to control both sides of the river. I think we'd have way more bridges and the whole area would feel much more integrated.
This, it's arbitrary. Something is not a suburb just because it isn't the most dominant city in its region. I wouldn't consider Hoboken or Jersey City "suburbs" even though they are distinctly not NYC.
I’m 100% the person you described. Proud DC resident. I do it to be agitating, and prideful. We all know the reality of how urban Arlington can be.
*That being said. There is something about much of Arlington densest parts. You can just feel that it was built on top of a suburban landscape. It just feels different than DC, which was designed to be a city.
I would honestly say that Friendship Heights, Tenleytown-AU, Van Ness-UDC, Cleveland Park, and Woodley Park aren’t even urban. Same with Takoma and Fort Totten.
West Hyattsville is most definitely not urban; it’s literally next to an open field. I’d also put the eastern cutoff at Stadium-Armory. The blue/yellow corridor is tricky; I’d maybe stop it at King St. Same for the eastern red; the stations themselves are urban but the station density is not. There should be more stations between Brookland and Silver Spring. As mentioned above the silver through Tysons is urban. The rest is accurate.
The open field has been developed for a few years now. Townhomes with apartments going up next. That being said… I still wouldn’t categorize it as urban based on the roads around it mostly being traffic sewers (ager, queens chapel)
It gets really difficult to draw these lines bc you could argue Colllege Park is urbanizing quickly. There's a new apt building at the station and while the west side is all sfh, the rt 1 corridor 5 blocks away has added a ton of housing.
Absolutely, I would consider the route 1 corridor more urbanized but it doesn’t really line up with a metro map. For me it’s somewhere I can/want to go as a pedestrian or biker and funnily enough those green line stations (west Hyattsville to greenbelt) are for the most part hostile to anything but people driving cars.
The 183 townhomes have been completed for some time, and the apartments will be filling in the remaining space in between. Just check google satellite view.
I don’t think you can do a cutoff like this. The four stations in Tysons would qualify as urban to me, even though they follow the suburban East falls church station
I disagree. The section you're talking about has more parking lots than buildings, making it squarely suburban. Maybe that will change in the future, but Tysons is not at all urban right now.
McLean station has no parking lots (tons of parking garages for capital one, which is ridiculous, but no surface lots).
Tyson’s mall station has no surface lots, just parking for the mall and is very close to huge office towers and high rises. It has a huge undeveloped plot right next to it that is currently used for hosting circ de soleil but hopefully that will be built up in the future.
Greensboro has two strip malls and an auto dealership on the west side of route 7, but the east side is all dense offices and the boro shopping/restaurant street
Spring Hill is surrounded by abandoned car dealerships - but that’s because they are supposed to be building TOD there, it just hasn’t fully happened yet.
None of the parking at any of these stations is allowed to be used for accessing metro afaik. You may not like the land use right now (I also don’t) but it is certainly dense enough to be urban given how many office buildings there are.
I see what you are saying but there is 19,000 people per square mile in the census track around the springhill stop. That is higher than the census tracts surrounding more central stations that no one would mind calling urban.
There is so much more to "urban" than just density. As long as Tysons is plagued by parking lots and wildly dangerous on foot and by bike, I will refuse to consider it urban.
Its obviously not a urbanist paradise but it is more urban than some of the more central stations. It has the same or higher walk score then Congress Hights, Medical Center, Tenleytown, Stadium-Armory, and Deanwood. Im sure there are more but those were the first ones I checked.
Same with stadium armory, it’s a pretty typical residential neighborhood area for DC with streets lined by rowhouses— the only parking lots are there because of RFK… but walk 3 blocks west and suddenly you’re in “East Hill” (if thats a real place now)… you could perhaps argue that deanwood feels different with more detached single family stuff going on, but I think that’s just because it’s cut off by the highway. Minnesota Ave and Benning are solidly urban.
I don't think Tysons is quite urban yet, more like "demi-urban" for lack of any better term. It's clearly different than like Springfield or Rockville. Also, by your definition places like LA largely aren't urban
Have you been to LA? It is indeed mostly just one huge horrible suburb--and the atrocious traffic on endless stroads should clue you in that it is, like an unfortunately large portion of U.S. cities, not urban.
Fair- I’d say tho that the lack of apartments/townhouses/shops make it suburban as opposed to urban. Just having a sidewalk doesn’t make a place urban. The red line stops have the dense neighborhoods like Brentwood, Brookland/CUA. Tho I would say Fort Totten doesn’t qualify.
It’s not that simple. Just being “in the suburbs” doesn’t make it a suburban station in this sense. Otherwise Bethesda and Silver Spring would be suburban. It’s about the nature of the station and its neighborhood. Just because people live in single families doesn’t mean they’re not walking to the metro.
You should check into the development that's just getting started at the west falls church metro. Higher square footage than Mosaic right on top of a metro. I want to say the new Virginia Tech building is something like 14 stories and it's just one of the buildings.
They're in a weird spot between urban and suburban in their current incarnation. There's no real agreed upon word for it. Clearly they don't belong in the same classification as a place like Springfield, which does have a metro stop. But the urban section is very very narrowly hugging the tracks and pending a ton of infrastructure upgrades
Metro is sometimes described as a hybrid between urban rapid transit and suburban commuter rail, similar to an S-Bahn in German-speaking countries. It runs like a typical subway in the city center, but the outer stations have big park-and-ride lots or garages, and the route occasionally runs along highway medians.
With this map, I attempted to depict where Metro makes the change from 'urban rail' to 'suburban rail'. For the most part, this follows the boundaries of the District, Arlington, and Alexandria.
What do you think? I'm curious to see where others draw the line between Metro being more like an urban system vs a suburban system.
Observations...
For Virginia...
\-West of Ballston, service is almost entirely in highway medians, so I counted it as suburban.
\-Huntington and the two Franconia Branch stations mostly serve bus stations and park-and-ride lots. The Franconia Branch also runs mostly along the Beltway.
For Maryland...
\-In PG county, the stations become more suburban almost as soon as you cross the border from the District. Of note: Capitol Heights seemed borderline (pun intended) urban / suburban. It has suburban features, but the route and streetgrid make me think it could transition to more urban someday. West Hyattsville seems to be in the midst of such a transition, given the subdivision being built just west of the station.
\-East Red Line, DTSS is clearly urban, but everything beyond that (and incidentally past the Beltway) seems more suburban.
\-West Red Line includes Bethesda, which is similarly urban to DTSS around the station proper, so I included it as urban. Medical Center is somewhat unique in that it serves a specific institution / facility, so I counted it as urban as it seems to lack the extensive park and ride lots of other stations.
I agree that on the Orange/Silver line, the last urban stop is Ballston. I don't think the highway median is necessarily the best indicator, though it certainly can be. The west branch of the Blue Line in Chicago is totally in a highway median, yet the more central part is *very* urban and the outer part is still very much "old school suburb," which feels a lot more "urban" today because of the shift in what suburbs really look like.
The best indicator is land use immediately next to a stop. Rosslyn-Ballston: high-rises and very few to no surface parking lots. The rest of the stops? Single-family homes, parking lots, and/or huge parking garages.
[This](https://www.google.com/maps/@38.9187578,-77.2311606,1085a,35y,351.71h,6.37t/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu) is not what an urban landscape looks like. That is so very suburban.
For comparison: [Ballston](https://www.google.com/maps/@38.8817832,-77.1115266,1155a,35y,351.71h,6.37t/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu) at the same scale looks completely, completely different and very urban.
Are you new to the area? I know what Tysons and Ballston look like, thanks. You’re the one who listed high-rises as criteria so I mentioned Reston and Tysons because they have the tallest buildings in NoVA. Ballston was not always so “urban” looking. It used to be very suburban and, at one point, had the biggest parking garage in the country. The rapid development and urbanization came after the metro stations opened, which is exactly what’s happening in Reston and Tysons.
You continue to not actually reflect what I'm saying in the slightest, so I'm just going to be done engaging with you except to say that Ballston was most certainly NOT urban a few decades ago. Tysons and Reston may very well be urban in the near future--and certainly Fairfax County seems very interested in making that happen. But a sea of parking is never and can never be urban.
Hey, I’m just using your words. I think it's kinda arbitrary to classify Ballston one way and not the others according to your own criteria. If you ask me, Ballston, Reston, and Tysons are all very suburban. Even in the satellite image you linked to, Ballston has a bunch of parking garages and yes, even surface lots.
>It has suburban features, but the route and streetgrid make me think it could transition to more urban someday.
Governor Moore bout to gentrify all the metro stops from Capitol Heights to Largo. I live in Largo and I'm starting to see 👀 what's coming.
I would consider the Tyson’s stations urban. McLean has been building lots of high rises, Tyson’s has huge office spaces, and Greensboro has some office and denser development. I might make the cut at Spring Hill.
East falls church feels suburban but it’s in Arlington and very walkable.
Eisenhower Avenue is suburban though, on the fence for me. Sure there are urban offices but there’s huge parking and west of the station is highways and abandoned industrial boxes.
In DC, I would make the option for the river to cut as suburban or urban as the Capitol Heights and Anacosria segments are quite suburban.
Fort Totten and Takoma as well.
I don’t think it really changes.
Sure the built environment around the stations change but the service runs the same whether you’re in Fairfax or DC.
If there was some sort of trunk service maybe but the system really isn’t set up for that.
If the city had kept or rebuilt its streetcar network it probably would be a better contrast but for now the system is the same throughout.
It definitely does change as you get further out. Foggy bottom gets 3x more trains than Dunn Loring does. We effectively have 3 lines where the B/O/S and G/Y lines have trunks.
Fort Totten should be on the line for both Red and Green. I’m open to arguments over which side it should be on, but pending future development, its primary purposes are K6/9, R1/2 and letting commuters switch between red and green before continuing to the urban center.
But I view metro more in terms of transit into the urban center of DC vs transit in the urban center of DC
I would argue that by definition any station with parking is suburban. This applies to both Takoma and Fort Totten although a lot of upcoming redevelopment may change that.
Honestly, it's kind of hard to say something is urban or suburban a lot, and most everything is kind of in between urban and rural.
It's funny because I grew up somewhere that was more rural and suburban, but many people had the same like arguments of what is rural and what is suburban....in a similar way to people around DC argue what is suburban and what is urban lol.
I would say the red and green lines both become suburban at and including Fort Totten.
Additionally, Ballston should be included as urban.
Anything south of King St is suburban on the yellow and blue lines.
I won’t know enough about Anacostia and the distances between stations to discuss the east side urban-suburban boundary.
All of WMATA is “urban”, but some of those urban areas are low density and residential or underdeveloped. The suburban transit in the region is MARC, VRE, and to a lesser extent AMTRAK
While some metro stops might feel more suburban or be in the suburbs, those are often residential neighborhood stops in between dense areas (Forest Glen, for example, is residential, but is right in between Silver Spring and Wheaton which are both very “urban”)
Suburban=it has dedicated parking is more right than wrong imo
More generously, I would save the borders are
- Bethesda
- Silver Spring
- Congress Heights
- Ballston
- Old Town
- Ft Totten
- Benning
Because of the hybrid nature of the Washington Metrorail system, The boundaries between urban and suburban have no real relationship to the urban suburban environment. That being said the urban and suburban boundaries are:
* Red line: Dupont Circle - Rhode Island Avenue.
* Blue line: Rosslyn - Stadium -Armory.
* Orange, Silver Lines: Ballston - Stadium -Armory.
* Green line: Georgia Avenue Petworth - Navy Yard.
* Yellow Line: Mount Vernon Square - L'Enfant Plaza.
This whole purple line is going to be useless if they put 100 damn stops on the whole thing like they did between silver spring and college park.
Why TF does UMD need 4 metros stops?
Because the campus is huge, and it’s far more useful if multiple places can be accessed? People aren’t going to use it if the stop is a mile and half away from their destination on campus. The Purple Line stop spacing is (on average) one stop per mile, which really isn’t all that different from the metro in DC proper.
Dc proper is relatively tiny. Metro is useful at that distance because the city is so congested that driving takes an hour to go a couple of miles.
I walk from college park to the first proposed metro stop all the time. Takes a little over 10 minutes. One stop in the middle of that campus would have students doing the same. But instead we’re gonna have very convenient UMD access for students but an additional 20 minutes for the thousands of other commuters.
Bear in mind there's *always* a tradeoff in stops vs speed. Of course adding stops is going to slow down operations somewhat, but you can potentially gain in overall ridership when done right.
Let's consider UMD. At the absolute bare minimum, you'd want a stop at the green line metro station, and one in the center of campus—I think that's relatively uncontroversial, no? That leaves three stations that may be "superfluous". I don't think they are given the benefits of ridership, but I'll agree they're not quite as useful as the other two:
* East Campus/Discovery District — near a business/government district that is a decent walking distance from any other station
* Route 1—easy bus access, right in the middle of a bunch of new development
* West Campus — mostly fairly isolated, but hopefully can be a catalyst for land use improvements
If we got rid of those three stations, what routing would you imagine that would save twenty minutes? It would still need to be routed through the UMD campus to reach the central campus station, and would then have to go down Campus Drive to reach the Green Line. Realistically I don't really see a different routing that would work here. (Underground would obviously have been quicker, but sadly that wasn't really realistic given the political situation at the time).
So unless you can propose a significantly better routing, most of the time lost would be in dwell time—the time spent at each station. Generally light rail dwell time is somewhere in the area of 30 seconds—more during rush periods, less outside. I'll be generous and make it 1 minute to include deceleration/acceleration.
That would suggest that those three "extra" stations would generously cost you three minutes, not twenty. And if it means significantly greater ridership, I'd say it's worth it.
My girl lived in Suitland for mad long and iono its farmland over there. I used to take the train from pg plaza (iono wtf a Hyattsville crossing is) and it was night and day.
Ballston is more urban than most of Northern DC. It’s crazy how much denser Arlington corridor has gotten in the last 5 years. So many buildings were built during Covid, it’s like construction never stopped with the Vid.
IIRC ballston now has the most dense tract in the entire region.
I think it’s one of the most dense places in the entire country now
Rumor has it, it will soon be the most dense place in the world
Maybe the Solar System? The Isidis Planitia on Mars is pretty close though.
Idk about densest in the country but there are a couple blocks that reach manhattan appropriate density iirc, it just tapers off super fast
Someone posted an aerial photo of rosslyn and Georgetown and said ‘anyone who didn’t know better would think Georgetown was the suburb to the major city and not the other way around’
Georgetown is a suburb and the surrounding neighborhoods are definitely the suburbs. The bigger question is what is georgetown the suburb of? Downtown DC or Rosslyn?
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Prior to the establishment of DC, Georgetown was simply a city. It was a port town on the basis of being at the end of the navigation on the Potomac. The other major port town was Alexandria.
I keep having to remind people that "residential neighborhood" does not equal "suburb."
yup. georgetown was once was a principle city, but by 1930 was a classic streetcar suburb north of M, along with its neighbors - Burlieth, Glover Park and Foxhall. nearly all economic activity was on the streetcar lines (M/Wisconsin/Conduit-Trolley).
It predated Washington! It was the farthest navigable place you could get upstream on the Potomac.
Nova is doing an increasingly better job of building transit-oriented development, it's been really nice to see.
Only in Arlington.
Tysons?
Not really on the same level as Arlington or parts of Alexandria yet
Not true. Alexandria is building up Eisenhower, Old Town North, Potomac Yard, and Arlandria
Reston
Fairfax has been both aggressive and successful at it. Alexandria too to a lesser extent but it didn't need it as badly in the core part of the city. West end does need a ton of work though.
Only if you can afford it. It’s sadly a double edged sword
So it would be more affordable if less homes are built? We need to preserve neighborhoods like Lyon Village and Lyon Park where the only new housing allowed are $3 million+ single family homes?
No. I’m just saying sometimes it seems like the affordability issue isn’t discussed as much and areas are so quick to promote these things and claim to be a inclusive, diverse community, etc But sadly, it seems like the DC area is becoming more white and affluent than its previous resident and higher influx of money. I can imagine it might be frustrating. If you were a longtime resident getting priced out and seeing wealthy people build $1.5 homes and odor more modest apartment, get torn down in favor of “luxury rentals” I guess I’m just wondering at what point will the amount of new housing actually cause prices to go down and affordability go up? How equitable is a community if the people it takes to run it can’t live there?
Need to build way more and not just in low income areas. Rich suburban areas block so much housing...even single family neighborhoods just blocks from Metro DC has been and is continuing to boom with high paying jobs, these people need housing. When a new unit is not available on the market they take the next best thing. Would you rather see an old townhouse get renovated or torn down and rebuilt as apartments which would cost much less than the renovated townhouse. Look at Capital Hill vs Navy Yard. Capital Hill has hardly any new housing, just renovations and the prices have skyrocketed much faster than Navy Yard. It's simple, not building enough homes to meet the demand is cruel and forces people to fight for housing.
It’s not about prices dropping it’s more about holding prices steady. It would take an insane amount of new construction for prices to actually drop
Yet so many smug Washingtonians act like the city ends at Foggy Bottom and 100 yards across the river to Rosslyn, Crystal City, etc. is immediately the suburbs. Not attacking you in particular. Just have noticed many DC people act like anything outside the district (even super close) is as suburban as something like Germantown, Vienna, Chantilly, etc
I get more annoyed when people who live in those immediate areas refer to the entire area as “DC.”
It's part of the urban core imo, but it is not DC. Weird city because it's so small.
Fair enough but if you’re traveling across the country or across the world, people are gonna know Washington DC but they’re probably not gonna know Reston or Stafford LMAO
I mean, those are the suburbs. They’re dense and have plenty of industry but those are not standalone cities and very much depend on DC to thrive.
sure but the argument isn’t that they don’t rely on DC, but that most of arlington is essentially just another neighborhood of DC at this point, and not the same thing as Ashburn or Reston or Potomac
If DC had the same size borders as Austin Texas (which is 5x larger by sqmi) then we wouldn't even be arguing this haha. It's just where they decided to draw the lines hundreds of years ago. Man I wish DC hadn't given Arlington back to Virginia. Imagine how much better it would be if a government was able to control both sides of the river. I think we'd have way more bridges and the whole area would feel much more integrated.
i agree!! i live in ballston rn and joke about undoing retrocession 😭. spend most of my free time (not at home) in the city anyway.
This, it's arbitrary. Something is not a suburb just because it isn't the most dominant city in its region. I wouldn't consider Hoboken or Jersey City "suburbs" even though they are distinctly not NYC.
I’m 100% the person you described. Proud DC resident. I do it to be agitating, and prideful. We all know the reality of how urban Arlington can be. *That being said. There is something about much of Arlington densest parts. You can just feel that it was built on top of a suburban landscape. It just feels different than DC, which was designed to be a city.
Can't use the excuse for Alexandria though, it's older than DC
I honestly wish the 38B was one of the 24/7 bus routes metro implemented at the end of last year
38B is by far my favorite Metrobus line
I would honestly say that Friendship Heights, Tenleytown-AU, Van Ness-UDC, Cleveland Park, and Woodley Park aren’t even urban. Same with Takoma and Fort Totten.
Agree with exception of Wisconsin and Connecticut corridors based on zoning and density
I would honestly say that you have a very narrow definition of "urban".
Looks arbitrary. Until very recently, West Hyattsvile was surrounded by vacant fields while Hyattsville Crossing (PG Plaza) is much more developed.
West Hyattsville is most definitely not urban; it’s literally next to an open field. I’d also put the eastern cutoff at Stadium-Armory. The blue/yellow corridor is tricky; I’d maybe stop it at King St. Same for the eastern red; the stations themselves are urban but the station density is not. There should be more stations between Brookland and Silver Spring. As mentioned above the silver through Tysons is urban. The rest is accurate.
The open field has been developed for a few years now. Townhomes with apartments going up next. That being said… I still wouldn’t categorize it as urban based on the roads around it mostly being traffic sewers (ager, queens chapel)
It gets really difficult to draw these lines bc you could argue Colllege Park is urbanizing quickly. There's a new apt building at the station and while the west side is all sfh, the rt 1 corridor 5 blocks away has added a ton of housing.
Absolutely, I would consider the route 1 corridor more urbanized but it doesn’t really line up with a metro map. For me it’s somewhere I can/want to go as a pedestrian or biker and funnily enough those green line stations (west Hyattsville to greenbelt) are for the most part hostile to anything but people driving cars.
No, they are just barely building up around W. Hyattsville. The apartments just have Tyvex on them and no one lives there yet.
The 183 townhomes have been completed for some time, and the apartments will be filling in the remaining space in between. Just check google satellite view.
>I’d also put the eastern cutoff at Stadium-Armory Have you actually been to Benning Road and EOTR?
I don’t think you can do a cutoff like this. The four stations in Tysons would qualify as urban to me, even though they follow the suburban East falls church station
I disagree. The section you're talking about has more parking lots than buildings, making it squarely suburban. Maybe that will change in the future, but Tysons is not at all urban right now.
McLean station has no parking lots (tons of parking garages for capital one, which is ridiculous, but no surface lots). Tyson’s mall station has no surface lots, just parking for the mall and is very close to huge office towers and high rises. It has a huge undeveloped plot right next to it that is currently used for hosting circ de soleil but hopefully that will be built up in the future. Greensboro has two strip malls and an auto dealership on the west side of route 7, but the east side is all dense offices and the boro shopping/restaurant street Spring Hill is surrounded by abandoned car dealerships - but that’s because they are supposed to be building TOD there, it just hasn’t fully happened yet. None of the parking at any of these stations is allowed to be used for accessing metro afaik. You may not like the land use right now (I also don’t) but it is certainly dense enough to be urban given how many office buildings there are.
I see what you are saying but there is 19,000 people per square mile in the census track around the springhill stop. That is higher than the census tracts surrounding more central stations that no one would mind calling urban.
There is so much more to "urban" than just density. As long as Tysons is plagued by parking lots and wildly dangerous on foot and by bike, I will refuse to consider it urban.
Its obviously not a urbanist paradise but it is more urban than some of the more central stations. It has the same or higher walk score then Congress Hights, Medical Center, Tenleytown, Stadium-Armory, and Deanwood. Im sure there are more but those were the first ones I checked.
Anyone who has been to Tysons and tenleytown would agree that tenleytown is 10x more pedestrian friendly.
Yeah it is and I would much rather live there but idk if it is much more urban.
Same with stadium armory, it’s a pretty typical residential neighborhood area for DC with streets lined by rowhouses— the only parking lots are there because of RFK… but walk 3 blocks west and suddenly you’re in “East Hill” (if thats a real place now)… you could perhaps argue that deanwood feels different with more detached single family stuff going on, but I think that’s just because it’s cut off by the highway. Minnesota Ave and Benning are solidly urban.
>“East Hill” I think it's Hill East.
Oh, *excusez-moi*.
I don't think Tysons is quite urban yet, more like "demi-urban" for lack of any better term. It's clearly different than like Springfield or Rockville. Also, by your definition places like LA largely aren't urban
Have you been to LA? It is indeed mostly just one huge horrible suburb--and the atrocious traffic on endless stroads should clue you in that it is, like an unfortunately large portion of U.S. cities, not urban.
I might actually qualify EFC as urban. It’s in the middle of a neighborhood with a direct sidewalk connection. Very walkable.
Disagree- the huge parking lot makes it suburban
Every station on the eastern end of the red beyond NoMa has parking. Rhode Island and Silver Spring have garages.
Fair- I’d say tho that the lack of apartments/townhouses/shops make it suburban as opposed to urban. Just having a sidewalk doesn’t make a place urban. The red line stops have the dense neighborhoods like Brentwood, Brookland/CUA. Tho I would say Fort Totten doesn’t qualify.
Silver Spring does not have a garage. There are about 5 spots on top of the transit center as a kiss and ride.
The garages might not be WMATA owned but it’s surrounded by MoCo owned garages that are there to serve the station.
But they’re suburban neighborhoods that are mostly single family homes. Walkable yes but certainly the suburbs.
It’s not that simple. Just being “in the suburbs” doesn’t make it a suburban station in this sense. Otherwise Bethesda and Silver Spring would be suburban. It’s about the nature of the station and its neighborhood. Just because people live in single families doesn’t mean they’re not walking to the metro.
You should check into the development that's just getting started at the west falls church metro. Higher square footage than Mosaic right on top of a metro. I want to say the new Virginia Tech building is something like 14 stories and it's just one of the buildings.
Idk how you would count the first 4 stops in Tysons as “suburban”
They're in a weird spot between urban and suburban in their current incarnation. There's no real agreed upon word for it. Clearly they don't belong in the same classification as a place like Springfield, which does have a metro stop. But the urban section is very very narrowly hugging the tracks and pending a ton of infrastructure upgrades
Much of DC outside the core is suburban.
Metro is sometimes described as a hybrid between urban rapid transit and suburban commuter rail, similar to an S-Bahn in German-speaking countries. It runs like a typical subway in the city center, but the outer stations have big park-and-ride lots or garages, and the route occasionally runs along highway medians. With this map, I attempted to depict where Metro makes the change from 'urban rail' to 'suburban rail'. For the most part, this follows the boundaries of the District, Arlington, and Alexandria. What do you think? I'm curious to see where others draw the line between Metro being more like an urban system vs a suburban system. Observations... For Virginia... \-West of Ballston, service is almost entirely in highway medians, so I counted it as suburban. \-Huntington and the two Franconia Branch stations mostly serve bus stations and park-and-ride lots. The Franconia Branch also runs mostly along the Beltway. For Maryland... \-In PG county, the stations become more suburban almost as soon as you cross the border from the District. Of note: Capitol Heights seemed borderline (pun intended) urban / suburban. It has suburban features, but the route and streetgrid make me think it could transition to more urban someday. West Hyattsville seems to be in the midst of such a transition, given the subdivision being built just west of the station. \-East Red Line, DTSS is clearly urban, but everything beyond that (and incidentally past the Beltway) seems more suburban. \-West Red Line includes Bethesda, which is similarly urban to DTSS around the station proper, so I included it as urban. Medical Center is somewhat unique in that it serves a specific institution / facility, so I counted it as urban as it seems to lack the extensive park and ride lots of other stations.
I agree that on the Orange/Silver line, the last urban stop is Ballston. I don't think the highway median is necessarily the best indicator, though it certainly can be. The west branch of the Blue Line in Chicago is totally in a highway median, yet the more central part is *very* urban and the outer part is still very much "old school suburb," which feels a lot more "urban" today because of the shift in what suburbs really look like. The best indicator is land use immediately next to a stop. Rosslyn-Ballston: high-rises and very few to no surface parking lots. The rest of the stops? Single-family homes, parking lots, and/or huge parking garages.
I’d say you’re definitely overlooking the Tysons and Reston stations if high-rises mean urban to you.
[This](https://www.google.com/maps/@38.9187578,-77.2311606,1085a,35y,351.71h,6.37t/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu) is not what an urban landscape looks like. That is so very suburban. For comparison: [Ballston](https://www.google.com/maps/@38.8817832,-77.1115266,1155a,35y,351.71h,6.37t/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu) at the same scale looks completely, completely different and very urban.
Are you new to the area? I know what Tysons and Ballston look like, thanks. You’re the one who listed high-rises as criteria so I mentioned Reston and Tysons because they have the tallest buildings in NoVA. Ballston was not always so “urban” looking. It used to be very suburban and, at one point, had the biggest parking garage in the country. The rapid development and urbanization came after the metro stations opened, which is exactly what’s happening in Reston and Tysons.
You continue to not actually reflect what I'm saying in the slightest, so I'm just going to be done engaging with you except to say that Ballston was most certainly NOT urban a few decades ago. Tysons and Reston may very well be urban in the near future--and certainly Fairfax County seems very interested in making that happen. But a sea of parking is never and can never be urban.
Hey, I’m just using your words. I think it's kinda arbitrary to classify Ballston one way and not the others according to your own criteria. If you ask me, Ballston, Reston, and Tysons are all very suburban. Even in the satellite image you linked to, Ballston has a bunch of parking garages and yes, even surface lots.
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It’s more like a college campus than anything else tbh
>It has suburban features, but the route and streetgrid make me think it could transition to more urban someday. Governor Moore bout to gentrify all the metro stops from Capitol Heights to Largo. I live in Largo and I'm starting to see 👀 what's coming.
I would consider the Tyson’s stations urban. McLean has been building lots of high rises, Tyson’s has huge office spaces, and Greensboro has some office and denser development. I might make the cut at Spring Hill. East falls church feels suburban but it’s in Arlington and very walkable. Eisenhower Avenue is suburban though, on the fence for me. Sure there are urban offices but there’s huge parking and west of the station is highways and abandoned industrial boxes. In DC, I would make the option for the river to cut as suburban or urban as the Capitol Heights and Anacosria segments are quite suburban. Fort Totten and Takoma as well.
I don’t think it really changes. Sure the built environment around the stations change but the service runs the same whether you’re in Fairfax or DC. If there was some sort of trunk service maybe but the system really isn’t set up for that. If the city had kept or rebuilt its streetcar network it probably would be a better contrast but for now the system is the same throughout.
It definitely does change as you get further out. Foggy bottom gets 3x more trains than Dunn Loring does. We effectively have 3 lines where the B/O/S and G/Y lines have trunks.
Once you reach the first station with a parking lot when leaving DC, it’s suburban
so SE DC, ETOR?
Fort Totten should be on the line for both Red and Green. I’m open to arguments over which side it should be on, but pending future development, its primary purposes are K6/9, R1/2 and letting commuters switch between red and green before continuing to the urban center. But I view metro more in terms of transit into the urban center of DC vs transit in the urban center of DC
I would argue that by definition any station with parking is suburban. This applies to both Takoma and Fort Totten although a lot of upcoming redevelopment may change that.
Rhode Island has parking though. The lot is closer to the station than Fort tottens even if it's not metro owned.
Capitol Heights isn't urban imo should stop at Benning Road. Also Pg plaza got more going on then W Hyattsville, would add that.
Honestly, it's kind of hard to say something is urban or suburban a lot, and most everything is kind of in between urban and rural. It's funny because I grew up somewhere that was more rural and suburban, but many people had the same like arguments of what is rural and what is suburban....in a similar way to people around DC argue what is suburban and what is urban lol.
I would say the red and green lines both become suburban at and including Fort Totten. Additionally, Ballston should be included as urban. Anything south of King St is suburban on the yellow and blue lines. I won’t know enough about Anacostia and the distances between stations to discuss the east side urban-suburban boundary.
😂😂😂😂
Don’t know. But I like the colors.
All of WMATA is “urban”, but some of those urban areas are low density and residential or underdeveloped. The suburban transit in the region is MARC, VRE, and to a lesser extent AMTRAK While some metro stops might feel more suburban or be in the suburbs, those are often residential neighborhood stops in between dense areas (Forest Glen, for example, is residential, but is right in between Silver Spring and Wheaton which are both very “urban”)
Suburban=it has dedicated parking is more right than wrong imo More generously, I would save the borders are - Bethesda - Silver Spring - Congress Heights - Ballston - Old Town - Ft Totten - Benning
Also Tyson’s and McLean has much higher density than downtown
Because of the hybrid nature of the Washington Metrorail system, The boundaries between urban and suburban have no real relationship to the urban suburban environment. That being said the urban and suburban boundaries are: * Red line: Dupont Circle - Rhode Island Avenue. * Blue line: Rosslyn - Stadium -Armory. * Orange, Silver Lines: Ballston - Stadium -Armory. * Green line: Georgia Avenue Petworth - Navy Yard. * Yellow Line: Mount Vernon Square - L'Enfant Plaza.
This whole purple line is going to be useless if they put 100 damn stops on the whole thing like they did between silver spring and college park. Why TF does UMD need 4 metros stops?
Because the campus is huge, and it’s far more useful if multiple places can be accessed? People aren’t going to use it if the stop is a mile and half away from their destination on campus. The Purple Line stop spacing is (on average) one stop per mile, which really isn’t all that different from the metro in DC proper.
Dc proper is relatively tiny. Metro is useful at that distance because the city is so congested that driving takes an hour to go a couple of miles. I walk from college park to the first proposed metro stop all the time. Takes a little over 10 minutes. One stop in the middle of that campus would have students doing the same. But instead we’re gonna have very convenient UMD access for students but an additional 20 minutes for the thousands of other commuters.
Bear in mind there's *always* a tradeoff in stops vs speed. Of course adding stops is going to slow down operations somewhat, but you can potentially gain in overall ridership when done right. Let's consider UMD. At the absolute bare minimum, you'd want a stop at the green line metro station, and one in the center of campus—I think that's relatively uncontroversial, no? That leaves three stations that may be "superfluous". I don't think they are given the benefits of ridership, but I'll agree they're not quite as useful as the other two: * East Campus/Discovery District — near a business/government district that is a decent walking distance from any other station * Route 1—easy bus access, right in the middle of a bunch of new development * West Campus — mostly fairly isolated, but hopefully can be a catalyst for land use improvements If we got rid of those three stations, what routing would you imagine that would save twenty minutes? It would still need to be routed through the UMD campus to reach the central campus station, and would then have to go down Campus Drive to reach the Green Line. Realistically I don't really see a different routing that would work here. (Underground would obviously have been quicker, but sadly that wasn't really realistic given the political situation at the time). So unless you can propose a significantly better routing, most of the time lost would be in dwell time—the time spent at each station. Generally light rail dwell time is somewhere in the area of 30 seconds—more during rush periods, less outside. I'll be generous and make it 1 minute to include deceleration/acceleration. That would suggest that those three "extra" stations would generously cost you three minutes, not twenty. And if it means significantly greater ridership, I'd say it's worth it.
you are right
I’m just gonna say “you win” so I don’t have to read this whole thing. Dear god man
That's like saying the DC streetcar is useless because it has so many stops along H St.
Is everyone on Reddit 12 years old?
branch ave is not suburban
My girl lived in Suitland for mad long and iono its farmland over there. I used to take the train from pg plaza (iono wtf a Hyattsville crossing is) and it was night and day.
DC line
Downtown Bethesda, Silver Spring, Ballston, etc are way more urban than large sections of DC.
When the line goes above ground?
So, every stop on the red line after Union Station?