Part 1 – Moving with the Times: Railway to Fortune

Cutting Transit Time                                                 

Fifty years of planning and five years of construction culminated this last July in the opening of Phase I of the Dulles Corridor Metrorail Project. Connecting Tysons Corner to Reston in the east, and Arlington and Washington D.C. in the west, the Silver Line aims to ease the burden of daytime travel along the Capital Beltway and into Tysons Corner, which until recently was possible only by automobile on increasingly congested roads.

Tysons Corner is Fairfax County’s central business district, and its night-time population of 20,000 regularly swells to over 100,000 as people commute in during the day to go attend jobs in Tysons. This daytime increase in population – a whopping 400% increase – has resulted in what many people openly state is an increasingly stressful commute into the area.

Despite being home to two super-regional shopping malls – the upscale Tysons Galleria and Tysons Corner Center, the largest mall in the Baltimore-Washington area – one interviewee in a recent Washington Post article said that, despite living in the Fort Totten area in northeastern Washington D.C., she’d never made the trip out to either mall because of the sheer amount of traffic congestion she’d have to face in a drive. With the opening of the Silver Line, what had once been an unimaginable trip became a simple one-hour commute.

The Silver Line has four stations in Tysons Corner. With many businesses and shopping areas conveniently located a comfortable walking distance from the stations, leaving your car at home and, say, taking a bus to the train station has become not only a viable alternative, but an increasingly convenient and attractive one. Phase II of the Silver Line Project, which is expected to complete construction by, and open in 2018, is planned to extend the currently existing rail line all the way to Washington Dulles International Airport.

By connecting the area’s central business district with the busiest airport in the Washington metropolitan area – IAD sees over 22 million passengers a year – the opening of Phase I of the Silver Line, and the eventual completion of Phase II promises growth and development in the area, both economically and in terms of population.

You can be part of that burgeoning growth. If you’re interested in learning more about expanding your business into the area, be on the lookout for Part 2 of “Moving with the Times: Railway to Fortune,” coming soon.

tags: Blog