On this day 10 years ago, Metrorail arrived in Tysons and Reston, connecting two growing communities in Fairfax County to D.C. by train for the first time.
Decades in the making, the Silver Line’s Phase 1 launch on July 25, 2014 represented the D.C. region’s biggest rail expansion since the Green Line opened in 1991 and set the stage for a connection to Dulles International Airport and Loudoun County that came to fruition with Phase 2 on Nov. 15, 2022.
For Fairfax County, the two-phase, $6 billion project was a critical piece of its ambitious effort to manage growth by concentrating development along major transit corridors, turning auto-centric, suburban sprawl into more accessible, mixed-use urban centers.
There have been setbacks, from construction delays and cost overruns to the still-reverberating disruptions introduced by the COVID-19 pandemic. For the most part, though, local leaders, transportation officials, developers and residents say they’re encouraged by the Silver Line’s progress so far.
“It’s definitely met expectations, even through some very difficult times around the pandemic,” Hunter Mill District Supervisor Walter Alcorn said while waiting for a Silver Line train. “…We’ve certainly seen a lot of developments occur along the Silver Line and around the Silver Line stations. That is consistent with our transit-oriented development policy, which is good.”
How the Silver Line got on track
Plans for rail service in the Dulles corridor date back to Dulles International Airport’s opening in 1962, when Tysons was little more than a corner store, dairy farms and peach orchards and Reston founder Robert E. Simon was still drawing up his vision for a walkable, integrated community.
New infrastructure, including the Capital Beltway (I-495) and Dulles Toll Road, ushered in a population and development boom over the next two decades that transformed Fairfax County from a residential D.C. suburb “into a complex commercial, residential, office, and research community,” according to the land use section of the county’s first Policy Plan adopted in August 1990.
The result of a major comprehensive plan review, the policy plan marked the county’s pivot toward transit-oriented development, as its urbanization raised concerns about traffic congestion and an “impending land shortage” that could affect the quality of life for existing, low-density neighborhoods.
“Fairfax County first started looking seriously at our growth strategy,” said Alcorn, who served on the Fairfax County Planning Commission from 1997 to 2012. “How are we going to grow? Were we going to grow all over Fairfax County, or were we going to grow primarily around transit?”
A transit alternatives study commissioned by the Board of Supervisors found “immediate pursuit of a rail option” in the Dulles corridor was unlikely due to the project’s expected cost and competing transportation needs, recommending an “aggressive” bus system instead. However, it also advised reserving space in the Dulles Airport Access Road’s median and identifying station sites for a future rail line.
After 19 more years of negotiations over the project’s design and funding that embroiled entities from the small Town of Herndon to Congress, construction finally commenced in March 2009 on Silver Line Phase 1, which added the McLean, Tysons, Greensboro, Spring Hill and Wiehle-Reston East stations.
Fairfax County Board of Supervisors Chairman McKay attributes the eventual breakthrough to three factors: financial support from the federal government, land use plans to guide development around the stations like the Tysons Comprehensive Plan that was then being updated, and the establishment of a Dulles Rail Transportation Improvement District in 2004.
According to the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA), which oversaw the Silver Line project, the county began charging commercial property owners an additional 22 cents per $100 of assessed value on their real estate taxes that July. The tax district was expected to generate up to $400 million for construction.
“If we had to come up with that money from our county general fund, this would have probably been delayed and delayed and delayed, like it had been in the past,” McKay said. “So, setting up a special tax district and saying, ‘Hey, look, for the people who own property in this corridor to pay more to support this infrastructure makes sense in everyone’s interest,’ and to get them to agree to do that was a huge part of making this happen.”
Ridership undercut by pandemic
When the $2.9 billion first phase opened, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) projected that the five stations would get about 25,000 daily riders during their first year of operations.
As Greater Greater Washington reported at the six-year anniversary, those numbers turned out to be wildly optimistic even by 2019, when the stations were collectively averaging 16,709 weekday riders, according to WMATA data. Ridership was rising at all five stations — led by 7,934 riders at the Wiehle station — until the pandemic hit, prompting a summer-long shutdown of Silver Line service.
Ridership dipped even further in 2021, when the stations averaged 3,190 weekday riders with the Spring Hill station seeing just 270 riders a day and the Wiehle station dropping to 1,378 riders. Metrorail as a whole saw just 15% of its pre-pandemic rider levels.
While ridership remains below even 2014 levels, usage of the Silver Line Phase 1 stations has steadily increased since 2022, reaching an average of 7,405 weekday riders so far this year, as of July 17.
The uptick reflects both a shift back to in-person or hybrid work schedules for employers like Capital One and Google as well as the introduction of new development and amenities near the stations, Metro Chief of Planning and Performance Officer Tom Webster says.
“You can see a very clear relationship between the density of activity and jobs near the stations…and the level of ridership, and that’s something certainly that’s expected from a transit planning standpoint,” he said. “So, the more there is in the quarter mile, half-mile, three-quarter-mile and mile away from the station in terms of destinations and activities, the higher the ridership.”
Metro rider recovery tied to development
Notably, the Tysons Metro station has overtaken Wiehle to become the most-used Phase 1 station with 2,051 average weekday riders. A market study released last summer by the Tysons Community Alliance found that area retailers had recovered about 92% of their pre-pandemic visitors, with Tysons Corner Center and Tysons Galleria bouncing back particularly strong.
In 2023, over 2 million people entered Tysons Corner Center through its plaza, which opened with the Metro station in 2014 and brought new retail, housing in the form of the Vita Apartments, the Tysons Tower office building and the Hyatt Regency Hotel, according to Jesse Benites, director of property management for the mall’s owner Macerich.
While not all of those visitors necessarily used Metro to get to the mall, since the plaza can be reached via a parking garage and a staircase from the street, that transit access has brought more customers, workers and even retail tenants that would otherwise be wary of “coming out to the suburbs,” he told FFXnow.
“There’s no doubt that it’s increasing the amount of traffic we have, our connectivity within the greater D.C. metro area,” Benites said. “It’s increased our market share, our ability to reach customers and also the ability for our own employees to reach the center, so it’s been extremely beneficial to have Metro connected to our property.”
The McLean Metro station has also seen ridership jump from 802 people a day in 2022 to 1,942 people a day this year, as Capital One continues building out its headquarters campus with offices, restaurants, a hotel, the performing arts venue Capital One Hall, and an elevated park.
In a statement, Capital One Center said it’s “pleased” employees and visitors have multiple travel options, noting that Silver Line Phase 2’s completion now gives guests at the Watermark Hotel “an easy and direct line to and from the airport.”
The development in Tysons East, which also includes the Scotts Run neighborhood on the south side of Route 123, has been exciting to follow for Donald Garrett, who moved near the McLean station in 2016 so he could take the Metro to work in downtown D.C. Drawn by apartment rents that were, at the time, “substantially more affordable” than those just two stops away in Ballston, he says Metro has also turned out to be useful for getting around Tysons.
“Whenever…like the circus is in town or [there’s] a big thing happening at the mall and whatnot, I can just avoid all that traffic and have a cheap, safe ride home, just going a couple of stops on the Metro,” Garrett said. “…So, I’m finding other uses for it too, and it’s been a great amenity, really, of living here.”
Ridership at the Wiehle station has started to tick back up to 1,718 riders after dropping from 2,408 in 2022 when the Phase 2 stations at Reston Town Center, Herndon, Innovation Center, Dulles Airport and Ashburn opened, making it no longer the western end of the line.
Prior to the pandemic, the Wiehle station “exceed[ed] everyone’s expectations,” Comstock Companies CEO Chris Clemente says, noting that the commuter parking garage — the only one built with Phase 1 — was “filled to capacity daily.” The Reston Station developer, which is headquartered at 1900 Reston Metro Plaza, began buying land in the Dulles corridor in 1999 in anticipation of the Silver Line.
According to Clemente, Reston Station and other transit-oriented developments haven’t faced the same challenges from the rise of remote work as older, more siloed office parks in the Dulles corridor and the D.C. region that are grappling with high vacancy rates.
“The dominant trend in the office sector nationwide during and since the pandemic, known as the ‘flight to quality,’ has created significant demand for trophy-class properties, especially those in well-planned mixed-use and transit-oriented developments like Reston Station,” he wrote in a statement.
Comstock has two office buildings approved for its Reston Row neighborhood, a 1.5-million-square-foot expansion of the completed Metro Plaza District that’s now under construction.
Back in Tysons, the Greensboro station has doubled its average weekday ridership from 510 in 2022 to 1,056 people this year, but the Spring Hill station, where development has been slow to emerge, continues to struggle, seeing just 728 riders a day.
The decline in office has been a challenge at Spring Hill, where a development that once promised the region’s tallest office building, dubbed The View, is now reportedly being eyed for a casino, despite strong local opposition.
Speaking at a groundbreaking for an affordable housing project near the McLean Metro station earlier this month, Providence District Supervisor Dalia Palchik told FFXnow she doesn’t see The View materializing “at this point,” but she also hasn’t seen any new development plans yet, acknowledging that “there are a lot of rumors out there.”
The Spring Hill area has seen some progress on the residential side, with recent approvals for an apartment building in place of a planned office and a conversion of the Sheraton Tysons Hotel into housing. A different affordable housing project, The Exchange at Spring Hill Station, broke ground in December.
Overall, WMATA believes ridership is trending in the right direction, buoyed in particular by demand for the Dulles Airport station, which hit 2 million passengers on June 5, though numbers have been more modest at the other Phase 2 stations.
“We’re encouraged by the growth in transit ridership at the stations and certainly see some opportunity for more and improved connections from those stations into the broader network,” Webster said.
Aerial photo via Fairfax County Historical Imagery Viewer
