RSS FeedGallery Place to Metro Center – The Solutions
This is part two of two in our Gallery Place-Metro Center subterranean pedestrian tunnel series.
A representative tunnel concept above, as depicted in a Metro presentation [page 18 of the PDF], presents how a GP-MC tunnel could look. If you’ve switched lines on the subway in New York or Boston you probably know all about pedestrian tunnels as station interconnects. Switching from Park Street to Downtown Crossing (Red to Orange – Boston) or Canal/Lafayette to Canal/Broadway (6 to N,Q – NYC) gives you a good idea of the concept. Tunnel construction isn’t cheap and the financing bandied about in the press comes in the form of city money plus the excess returns from selling the Metro HQ building on 5th Street. DC is dangling a financing package in front of Metro to move to Anacostia and Metro may open up a comment period on the matter but there are many priorities competing for attention. No further word since mid-June from John Catoe, Metro’s GM.
I’d gladly walk a tunnel but my current solution takes a different form. This blogger stays away from GP and MC as much as possible during rush hour and transfers at L’Enfant Plaza. Trains don’t bunch up, aren’t as crowded and who doesn’t like rail surfing those shiny, brand, spanking new cars on the Yellow-Green line?
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Comments
Would be great, but i suspect this is one of those things that people will still be talking about in 10 years (don’t mean to sound like such a skeptic, but also doubtful that the end result would look as nice as the glass / steel tunnel depicted in the drawing.
200 years from now when these downtown pedestrian tunnels are complete someone will look back in these archives and say: “Look, they said it wouldn’t be done for 200 years and they were right!”
For some reason, the pic reminds me of Orson Welles’ The Trial. All you need is a few thousand rows of bureaucrats behind typewriters.
I suspect anon 6:49 is right, and the tunnels wont be built. But there is no reason not to immediately institute the so called “overland transfer.” It’s crazy that I am charged for two metro rides if I get off at one farragut, walk to the other, and get on a different train merely b/c I want to avoid crowds at metro center. SmartTrip cards have to be capable of doing this simple procedure.
While they’re at it, could they program the cards to let you out of a station for free if you decide to leave without riding anywhere? This isn’t so much of a problem at Gallery Pl Metro because there are the screens telling you train wait times outside the gates, but in many other stations you have to pay only to find out that you’re facing a 20 minute wait.
But the screens at Gallery Place (the ones right before you proceed through the gates) rarely are right. For some reason they appear to be on a different system than the ones on the tracks.
Sorry, but I don’t see a great need for these.
In Philly and Boston, these walkways are more because they are unifying disjointed systems into one. They were essentially an afterthought.
WMATA is generally one of the safer systems crimewise. I’m willing to bet these would hurt that.
The openness of Metro discourages crime. Walkways might create spots where crime could occur.
My sense is also that some of the NY-Boston tunnels may be related to their climate, and the fact that there can be many months a year where it’s too cold to be walking in between unconnected stations. (Though you could argue that here with the heat.) I think the overland transfer idea sounds ideal, and I agree with the poster about avoiding GP and MC during rush hour. I will often choose to take the bus a bit of the way out of downtown to get to a less-crowded station.
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Its time some interconnecting tunnels were built. Totally unrelated subject – ZARA opens next month!