Capital One Center might reintroduce parking to a site that had been closed off for the construction of an urban park.
While the park is still in the works, Capital One has proposed building an interim parking garage at 1820 Dolley Madison Blvd near its headquarters in Tysons, asking Fairfax County staff to confirm that no zoning changes are necessary to allow the structure.
“The parking structure would serve the wider public, as well as providing Capital One employees and visitors additional parking to support the adjacent Capital One Headquarters Campus, which is experiencing intense parking demand and congestion,” McGuireWoods attorney Steven Mikulic wrote in an April 30 letter to the Fairfax County Department of Planning and Development’s zoning director.
The request was first reported by the Washington Business Journal.
According to a plan submitted to the county, Capital One’s proposed garage would have 1,006 parking spaces — including 17 ADA-accessible spaces for cars and four for vans — across 10 or 11 levels, nine of them above ground.
The garage would be located near the Dolley Madison and Scotts Crossing Road intersection at the southeast corner of a 9.4-acre property that’s partially occupied right now by Capital One Park, a 650-seat baseball stadium.
Acquired by Capital One from Scotts Run developer Cityline Partners in 2019, the site was used for years as a parking lot open to commuters using the nearby McLean Metro station and visitors to the emerging development on the banking giant’s headquarters campus.
The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors approved a project known as Scotts Run North in 2015 that envisioned 1.5 million square feet of mixed-use development on the site, including two residential towers and three office buildings — one of which could be turned into a hotel instead — with 49,000 square feet of retail space.
With no immediate plans to start work on those buildings, though, Capital One secured the county’s approval in 2022 to replace the parking lot with a temporary baseball diamond and a permanent, 33,410-square-foot Capital One East Park whose amenities could include a water feature, landscaping, play and fitness areas, a plaza, outdoor seating and parking for food trucks.
Construction began last year and is expected to finish sometime in 2025 on the Capital One East Park as well as a second urban park with a 296-space underground parking garage that will be directly adjacent to the McLean Metro station.
The approved 2022 plan included a proffer, or condition, permitting “privately owned and operated commercial off-street commuter parking” on the Capital One East property, according to Mikulic’s letter. The parking could be provided in surface lots similar to what was previously available, or in garages.
Capital One Center currently has a general parking garage (1680 Capital One Drive South) for employees and visitors, including Capital One Hall patrons, that charges $15, along with a “premium” parking garage for events and Watermark Hotel guests that costs a whopping $40.
It’s unclear whether Capital One will impose similar rates at the new garage, as allowed by its proffer. A Capital One Center spokesperson didn’t respond to inquiries from FFXnow by press time.
The McLean Metro station and other Silver Line stops in Tysons were intentionally developed without commuter parking in an effort to discourage people from driving to and from the stations. County officials and other Tysons advocates hope the density of development planned for the urban center and transportation improvements will enable people to travel without getting into a car, though that aspiration has not yet become a reality.
More than a decade now since its launch, the first phase of Metro’s Silver Line has started to recover riders after usage across the system plummeted in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, though entries at the Tysons stations remain below 2019 levels, according to Metro data.
The McLean station sees the most rail ridership of the four stops in Tysons, averaging more than 2,265 entries per weekday so far this year — just shy of the 2,308 weekday average seen in 2019.
